drama

Manchester by the Sea (2016)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

A lot of the critical dialogue surrounding Manchester by the Sea is about how soul-shatteringly sad the film is. For instance, warning audiences about the emotional heft of the film was actually the basis of Casey Affleck’s entire opening monologue when he recently hosted SNL. That reputation’s not exactly off-base. Manchester by the Sea is a dramatic study of a family in grief over two timelines, a portrait of loss & regret in the most realistic of terms. People get so unbearably sad in this film that their bodies shut down, their eyes go dead, and they can’t fathom a reason why they should live for another minute. The dirty secret about Manchester by the Sea, though, the part that most people aren’t addressing, is that despite its fearless gaze into the suicidal depths of grief & loss, it’s actually really damn funny. The immense pressure the film’s dramatic weight puts on its characters is constantly released by flippant, tough guy humor and you’re a lot more likely to laugh through a majority of the film than you are to cry. Just when you feel like you can easily laugh away the pain, though, the film’s emotional devastation crashes in on you in an insurmountable flood. It’s true to life in that way.

Casey Affleck headlines this small budget weepie as an underpaid handyman who has to step in to handle his brother’s estate after his sudden, but expected death. This responsibility includes caring for his teenage nephew, played by Lucas Hedges, something he’s not at all prepared for due to a past trauma that’s gradually revealed to the audience in flashbacks. What develops is two duelling timelines, both heartbreaking in their circumstances, but made amusing by the quiet, sullen humor of its tough guy protagonists who foolishly believe they’re stronger than their own emotions. Much like with the recent black comedy Joshy, Manchester by the Sea is largely about the way traditional masculinity doesn’t leave room for genuine expressions of emotional pain. Characters cover their feelings with tough-it-out jokes & good-natured ribbing until the arrival of someone actually willing to address the trauma head on, roles filled by the wonderfully talented Michelle Williams & Gretchen Mol, rushes the truth to the surface.

Casey Affleck’s lead performance is going to overshadow a lot of this film’s other details when it comes to its critical reputation. The quiet squeaks in his voice, the dead eyes of PTSD, the sudden bursts of explosive violence: his performance is well-deserving of the attention it’ll attract. This is a movie that’s non-imposing in its visual craft, washing everything in greys & seafoam greens so that the performances & the dialogue are more of the main attraction than the directorial work. Mol, Williams, and Hedges all make excellent use of each moment they’re afforded, but Affleck’s consistent hovering between looking like he might weep or throw a punch at any second is going to steal a lot of their thunder. That’s okay, though. What I was most impressed by in Manchester by the Sea wasn’t at all the heartbreaking drama Affleck skillfully conveys under the falsely calm surface of each scene. Rather, I was most struck by the way the film clashes a take-no-shit Boston bro attitude with devastating moments of emotional fragility to pull out something strikingly funny from the wreckage. The film works really well as a dramatic actors’ showcase, but it’s that act of black comedy alchemy that made it feel special to me.

-Brandon Ledet

Loving (2016)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

With his two feature film entries in 2016, Jeff Nichols has established a very clear (although probably unintentional) genre pattern in his career. The director seems to be strictly alternating between realistic familial drama & high concept sci-fi in his work (with a little of the former category seeping in to inform the latter). The sequence so far looks like this: Shotgun Stories (drama), Take Shelter (sci-fi), Mud (drama), Midnight Special (sci-fi), and now Loving (drama). Although Shotgun Stories is contrarily my favorite title from the director, I typically find myself more enamored with the sci-fi end of this divide. Loving finds Nichols returning to the muted, sullen drama of Mud, this time with a historical bent. It isn’t my favorite mode for a director who’s proven that he can deliver much more striking, memorable work when he leaves behind the confines of grounded realism, but something Nichols does exceedingly well with these kinds of stories is provide a perfect stage for well-measured, deeply affecting performances. Actors Joel Edgerton & Ruth Negga are incredibly, heartachingly sincere in their portrayals of real-life trail-blazers Richard & Mildred Loving and Nichols is smart to take a backseat to their work here, a dedication to restraint I respect greatly, even if I prefer when it’s applied to a more ambitious kind of narrative.

Loving, which really does have a conveniently apt title thanks to history, is an exercise in directorial patience & discipline. A decades-spanning dramatization of a young Virginian couple as they raise children & defy a federal law banning interracial marriage in a historical Supreme Court decision, this film could have easily been an over-the-top melodrama about hard-fought courtroom battles & explosively violent racism in the South, especially in the hands of an Oscar-minded director like a Ron Howard or a Spielberg. In Nichols’s version of the story, however, the seething anger over the Loving couple’s interracial romance is just as quiet & deeply seated as their love for one another. The score can be a little imposing in its own tenderly sad way, but for the most part Nichols avoids cliché and mostly just makes room to allow his actors to quietly do their thing. Portraying a couple who were more interested in being left alone than (literally) making a federal case out of the “crime” of being married, Edgerton & Negga brilliantly use the negative space of non-reaction to convey the emotional swell of a scene. Negga is especially skilled at this maneuver, making the mute reaction to a phonecall or a shared physical intimacy with Mildred’s sister hit like a ton of bricks without ever calling attention to herself. The distracting presence of actors Nick Kroll & frequent Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon detracts from that disciplined subtlety, but they’re also playing characters who bring publicity & legal attention to the Lovings’ case, so their sore thumb effect might’ve been deliberately intended. Either way, all of the romance, suffering, and compassion in Loving rests in Edgerton’s & Negga’s steady, capable hands and Nichols’s best moments in this traditionalist drama is in the way he harnesses their quiet energy for a subtly devastating effect.

If you wanted to be especially morbid in your reading of the film, you could say that Loving has an alarming amount of significance in a modern context, given many Western countries’ sudden far right return to horrifying ideology like “God’s law” & “racial purity.” This isn’t the metaphorical, history-minded political statement of titles like the Hitler-themed black comedy Look Who’s Back, though. If anything, Loving reminds me of the quietly measured drama of last year’s Brooklyn (sans the pretty dresses for the most part, unfortunately). It doesn’t force attention-grabbing moments of high stakes drama, but instead details a fragile romance in a perilous era that threatens to shatter it under immense social & legal pressure. Loving is less about racism than it is about, well, loving and the movie only really stumbles when outside personalities disrupt the believable romantic ideal Edgerton & Negga establish in their scenes (Nick Kroll’s presence is especially egregious on that note). Nichols finds interesting detail to signify the era: the early stirrings of rock & roll in exciting hot rod races; playful abandon in Mason jars full of moonshine; the horror movie atmosphere of small town law enforcement creeping through the night. His best impulse here, though, is in the way he backs up to allow space for Negga & Edgerton to work their magic. It’d be tempting say that any director could’ve made Loving, because of that absence of stylistic imposition, but I don’t think many directors would’ve displayed the same level of restraint in a drama about such an important Supreme Court case. Nichols puts a relatable, knowable face to history here (with his talented cast’s help, of course). Although this is far from my favorite work he’s put in so far as a director or as a stylist (Midnight Special makes sure it’s not even his most winning success this year), it’s this exact kind of discipline & restraint that sells his higher-concept work so believably & effectively.

-Brandon Ledet

The Little Prince (2016)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

three star

The recent animated feature The Little Prince has had an interesting path to reaching American audiences. After earning rave reviews abroad and being advertised at theaters in the States, the film was dropped from its release schedule and unceremoniously dumped on Netflix streaming following months of distribution limbo. I’m far from a connoisseur of modern CG animation. Pixar movies don’t quite excite me in the same way they do for most folks and I’m much likelier to seek out a hand-drawn or stop motion-animated film than a Wreck It Ralph or Big Hero 6 or what have you. I will say, though, that the way The Little Prince has been quietly swept aside baffles me a great deal. It’s by no means a contender for best animated feature of the year or anything (not with Kubo & Zootopia looming large), but it’s at the very least more thoughtful & well-constructed than what I assume (but hopefully will never find out) most people got out of this year’s lesser CG fare: Storks, Trolls, Angry Birds, oh my! And those all made huge profits at the theater. Anyone looking for Pixar-quality storytelling & emotional resonance is likely to enjoy this discarded dark horse on some level, even if it wasn’t my usual taste in entertainment, so it’s weird to see it dismissed so casually on the distribution end of the business.

There’s two dueling storylines in The Little Prince. One is told in a storybook fashion and is based on the popular children’s book of the film’s namesake (which I honestly know mostly from Tumblr posts & friends’ tattoos, not from growing up with it); the other is a coming of age tale in which a young girl befriends a lonely old man. The Little Prince is interesting in the way it never puts too fine of a point on the way the themes of its two halves communicate. Both stories are in some way about the value and difficulty in maintaining companionship, but overall the movie exists as a love letter to childhood imagination. In the film’s own words, “Growing up is not the problem, forgetting is.” The old man (voiced by Jeff Bridges), who spends most of his days working on model planes, listening to Dixieland jazz, and recounting the story of the Little Prince to his new school age friend, never forgot the value of play & imagination as he grew older. Every other adult seems to have lost that perspective. As the little girl protagonist faces a rigid summer schedule meant to prepare her for an intensely regimented educational institution, everyone from her own mother to her educational oppressors seem determined to dampen and homogenize her imagination. The old man and his story of the Little Prince offer a (literally) brighter, more exciting future, and a lot of the film’s conflict is generated in the clash of those two ideals.

What drew me into watching this film in the first place, despite it not being my typical thing, was the multimedia approach to its animation. The story of the old man & the young girl is an all-CG, Pixar-reminiscent proposition, one that looks a little like a cheaper version of the medium like Anna and the Moods due to its budgetary limitations. The film begins with a hand-drawn sequence with watercolor added for texture, though, and the titular Little Prince half of the story is told through stop motion animation, something I’m always a sucker for. If the entire film were as interesting to look at as the Little Prince’s claymation worlds, I might be praising it a little more emphatically. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the wraparound CG story quite as worthwhile as the storybook Little Prince vignettes it contains, as it both looked & felt less special in the context of its time, where a CG-animated tale about the value of imagination & individuality are not at all difficult to come by.

I wouldn’t say that The Little Prince would have been a more resounding success if it were all stop motion or hand-drawn. I had some problems with the story too, particularly when its two worlds collide in a third act attempt to transform what was at one time a character-driven familial drama into a cookie cutter action adventure. My main complaint with the film is that outside that last minute stretch, when the film feels least emotionally impactful, its two halves never really feel like a cohesive whole. The stop motion animation version of The Little Prince‘s source material is something very interesting and beautiful to behold; the CG framing device was fine, but not something I would seek out without the titular hook. There’s some clever visualization of the monotonous trudge of time & adult life that colors that half of the film and I’ll admit I teared up at the emotional climax of its story arc once the action adventure shenanigans were put to rest (not that it takes much for me to cry these days; a TV commercial can get me to do that in seconds). I just could never shake the feeling that The Little Prince didn’t fully belong tied to that Pixar-shaped story in the first place. Those more in tune with that genre might be inclined to disagree and I think it’s at least fair to say this film deserved a fairer shake than the one it got, as I’m sure there was an audience out there who would’ve been eager to see it at the theater.

-Brandon Ledet

Arrival (2016)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

fourstar

I was very shaky on Arrival’s merits as high concept sci-fi until its third act revelations & narrative upendings completely turned me around on how I was thinking about the story it was telling. As such, it’s difficult to discuss the film’s successes without diving headfirst into spoilers, which is something I’d like to avoid in this review if possible. Arrival is a film about two species, human and alien, learning to communicate with one another by the gradual process of establishing common ground between their two disparate languages. Similarly, the film has to teach its audience how to understand what they’re watching and exactly what’s being communicated. It’s often said that movies are about the journey, not the destination, a (cliché) sentiment I’d typically tend to agree with, but so much of Arrival‘s value as a work of art hinges on its concluding half hour that its destination matters just as much, if not more than the effort it takes to get there. This is a story told through cyclical, circular, paradoxical logic, a structure that’s announced from scene one, but doesn’t become clear until minutes before the end credits and can’t be fully understood until at least a second viewing. Whether or not you’ll be interested in that proposition depends largely on your patience for that kind of non-traditional, non-linear payoff in your cinematic entertainment.

My initial complaints about Arrival‘s narrative shortcomings are fairly indicative of how I feel about high-concept sci-fi cinema as a whole. With a lot of hard sci-fi, Big Ideas are given prominence while smaller, more personal emotions take an unfortunate back seat. In an ideal sci-fi work, something like Ex Machina or Midnight Special, those two ends meet a well-balanced compromise. Arrival struggles to find that compromise, opening with a world-class linguist (played by a wonderfully measured & muted Amy Adams) as she recounts the loss of a child & the monotony of an academic life lived alone, but not taking the time to live in those moments & make their emotional impact count for something. The familial drama at the film’s center is conveyed through an impressionistic set of Tree of Life-type imagery & brief conversational snippets, a preview of the worst information dump stretches of the film’s eventual alien invasion plot that finds Adams’s protagonist at the center of a potentially world-ending interplanetary negotiation. The way narrative information is conveyed in Arrival is often cold & blatantly utilitarian, at one point even spelled out in a narrated monologue that completely disrupts the flow of its storytelling rhythm. The film is much more interested in the global implications of an alien invasion (within which it’s much less realistic than a Godzilla film from this year of all things, in how it depicts America’s involvement in such a crisis) and the tensions between military & academia in its problem-solving strategies than it is depicting the smaller scale personal impact that would make these tensions resonate with any significance. Any and all personal drama within Arrival, no matter how traumatic, exists only to serve the weirder turns the plot takes in its mind-bending second half. It’s a good thing that the ideas they serve in the film’s gloriously strange conclusion are so interesting that their emotionless delivery in the front end doesn’t matter in the slightest.

I’m typically a style over substance audience when it comes to movies, especially sci-fi, so a lot of Arrival wasn’t my usual mode of genre filmmaking. Until the film pushes its narrative into the loopy, paradoxical territory of its glorious third act, it mostly just reminded me of The Martian: a reasonably entertaining story of scientific problem-solving with more in-the-moment significance than ideas worth chewing over long-term. I was very much struck by the film’s design of the alien species and their vaguely egg-shaped ships, which had a kind of 2001 monolith vibe in their clean lines & oppressive grandeur. The film would have been perfectly admirable as a The Day the Earth Stood Still-style parable about humanity’s potentially aggressive response to alien contact had it remained a straightforward story, but it thankfully expands into something much stranger & much more unique. Arrival is above all else a story about the power of language, how it is the first weapon drawn in a conflict, how learning a new one can rewire your brain to think differently. Once you learn the film’s own language, you start to understand that it was never a straightforward story to begin with, that it was always just as strange as the places it eventually takes you in its final act. This rewiring of audience perception takes a little patience before it reaches a significant payoff and it’s one I expect is better appreciated when experienced rather than explained. Director Denis Villeneuve tried to do something similar with the surreal conclusion of his film Enemy, another work that plays with his audience’s linear perception of storytelling, but I think he’s much more successful in pulling off the trick in Arrival. For all of my early misgivings about the film’s emotionless information dumps & preferences for big ideas over small character moments (despite the best efforts of Adams & other capable actors like Michael Stuhlbarg, Forrest Whitaker, and Jeremy Renner), the weird dream logic surrealism and paradoxical reality-shifting of the final act makes all of those complaints entirely worthless. The truth is that the film & I just started off speaking different languages and it’s value as a work of high-concept sci-fi storytelling was lost in translation until we found common ground. I’m very much eager to give it a second look now that I know how to communicate with its more outlandish ideas in a less-linear, less literal fashion.

-Brandon Ledet

Daughters of the Dust (1991)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

threehalfstar

The lateness of some political milestones can be horrifying to realize once you put them in temporal context. There are people alive now who lived through a time before women earned the right to vote in American elections. In 1964 The Beatles gave birth to modern pop music the same year The Civil Rights Act (legally) ended racial segregation. The Supreme Court made gay marriage legally binding in 2015, less than 15 years after it officially decriminalized sodomy in 2003. I’m always bewildered (and more than a little horrified) by how late in the game these kinds of milestones arrive and my most recently discovered example on that note is the case of Daughters of the Dust. Daughters of the Dust was the first feature film directed by a black woman to earn a theatrical release in the United States. In 1991. That’s madness. The same year Silence of the Lambs swept the Oscars, the Internet was first made available for commercial use, Nirvana’s Nevermind made punk popular again, and Rodney King’s assault & arrest were caught on video tape, the first film directed by a black woman to be theatrically released in the US landed a political milestone that should have come decades, if not almost a century sooner. I can’t get over that.

One of the best things about Julie Dash’s history-making crown jewel is that it is fiercely, unapologetically black. Typifying pop culture Afrocentrism of the early 90s, the film depicts several generations of a Gullah family of slave descendants as they negotiate on what level they’d be participating in the modern world. Isolated on an island off the American coast near Georgia, the Gullah people thrived as free outsiders with their own unique culture, language, and customs. The threat of rape, exploitation, and enslavement looms over them, but is kept entirely off-camera as the film focuses on a very specific moment early in the 20th Century as younger generations long to leave behind old religions to join a modern world they’ve only seen in photographs while their elders cling to culture & tradition. Rhythmic African percussion, folk art, and meticulous food preparation (including what looks like a life-changing gumbo) drive the film’s apparent concern with preservation of culture in the face of a world that seems determined to colonize and homogenize. For all of Daughters of the Dust‘s fretting over staying still vs keeping in motion and reminders to “Respect your family. Respect your elders. Respect your ancestors,” it doesn’t at all play like an academic exercise in anthropology cinema. Besides being a vivid record of a highly specific black cultural experience, Daughters of the Dust also feels deeply personal and resoundingly poetic.

Written, directed, and produced by Dash herself, the film boasts the art film obfuscation that often gets called “dreamlike” or a “tone poem.” The negotiations (mostly between women) over who will and who will not be returning to mainland America after the film’s climactic feast provide a very basic structure for the story Daughters of the Dust wants to tell, but a lot of its narrative is expressed through the feelings evoked in its imagery. Floods of wild horses disrupt island calm. Purple steam rises from wooden cauldrons as women process indigo dye. Characters languidly drape themselves on immense trees like sentient moss. The whole story is narrated by a bodyless spirit billed as Unborn Child in the credits. Dash’s film is a sometimes impenetrable, but often beautiful evocation of a mood & a spirit. It may first appear from the outside to be a historical work about the Gullah people on the precipice of the modern world, but Daughters of the Dust strives to be something much grander & harder to pinpoint than that reductive description and it’s near-impossible not to admire the film’s ambitions even when its individual moments aren’t wholly successful.

I’ll admit that at times during this film I had found it to be more interesting as an artifact than as a moment to moment experience. Much like the films of similarly image-centric auteurs like Nicolas Winding Refn (who I love) and Terrence Malick (who I loathe), this is the kind of work where you have to find its rhythm early or else get left behind. Besides my personal lack of interest in narratively loose, intentionally obscured modes of filmmaking, an occasional choice in home video-era frame rate or embarrassingly dated soundtrack cues threw me off in specific moments where I lost the rhythm of what Daughters of the Dust was trying to accomplish (and, to be fair, those were likely editing choices, the one area of production Dash didn’t handle herself). I did, however, continuously find the film fascinating & wondrous to behold as it presented a culture and a set of images rarely evoked onscreen. Having watched the less than stellar Kino-released DVD of the film, I’m very much interested in seeing the restored version of Daughters of the Dust that’s currently making the rounds (having just played at New Orleans Film Fest last month). Not only was Dash’s film a far too late cultural milestone for black female directors, it hasn’t been well treated or remembered in the decades since its release. After being cited as a major influence on Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, though, it seems that it’s finally getting the respect & recognition it deserves and I’d love to see how vivid the film’s powerful imagery is in its latest, most well-handled incarnation, so I can fall even further under its spell.

-Brandon Ledet

Moonlight (2016)

/ swampflix / 31 Comments

fourstar

I had a certain amount of anxiety going into Moonlight that the film might slip into a lot of the clichés queer dramas often succumb to. Specifically, I didn’t want to suffer through yet another devastating tragedy where being homosexual meant an automatic death sentence & the audience was made to feel awful about the cruel world we live in that killed the fictional character the film created. A lot of the once-controversial empathy in those narratives has become so stale & so dispiriting at this point, while openly celebratory or even normalized queer narratives remain a rarity in major cinematic releases. As a queer drama set in an impoverished POC community in the South that deals with both drug abuse & childhood bullying, Moonlight had plenty of room to slip into this familiarly dour mediocrity. My anxiety wasn’t entirely off-base, as the film does traffic in a justifiably sad, tragic tone for a large bulk of its runtime, but there’s no honest way to claim that Moonlight is at all a more-of-the-same cliché, queer cinema or otherwise. Director Barry Jenkins delivers something much more wonderfully strange & strangely wonderful than what I could have expected, feared, or hoped for based on the film’s advertising. Moonlight is its own singular experience. It cannot be understood through the trappings of any genre convention.

A large part of what abstracts Moonlight and saves it from dramatic banality is its basic structure as a triptych. Bedsides functioning as a queer narrative about how homosexual desire violently clashes with traditional ideas of black masculinity in the modern world, the film also works as a coming of age & self-acceptance story for a single man who’s forced to navigate & survive that clash. We see Chiron as a child, a teenager, and an adult man. All three stages are portrayed by different actors. All three are devastatingly lonely. All three desperately hang onto the small displays of tenderness & solidarity they can scrape together in a world that considers their very existence an act of violence. Chiron is an amalgamation of varied struggles under social & economic pressures he was born into without asking. As the audience pieces together what these three parts of his life amount to when assembled into an single character, Chiron attempts to make sense of himself in a similar way. A more conventional movie might have been attempted to span his entire life, like in a sap-coated biopic, but instead we get glimpses of thee formative moments, each alternating between tenderness & abuse from minute to minute. Narrowing down Chiron’s life to these temporal snapshots allows us to dive deep into the character instead of casually empathizing from the surface. And the result is not nearly as bleak as I’m making it sound here, I promise.

Jenkins somehow, miraculously finds a way to make this meditation on self-conflict, abuse, loneliness, addiction, and homophobic violence feel like a spiritual revelation, a cathartic release. So much of this hinges on visual abstraction. We sink into Chiron’s dreams. We share in his romantic gaze. Time & sound fall out of sync when life hits him like a ton of bricks, whether positively or negatively. The camera lingers on the beauty of multi-color lights reflected off black skin (perhaps in a nod to the stage play source material In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue). My eyes welled up with tears at various times during Moonlight, but it wasn’t always in disgust with how cruel the world can be to a black, queer man struggling to emulate traditional modes of masculinity. Sometimes it was the slightest, most microscopic physical or emotional displays of support & solidarity that stirred a reaction in me. Barry Jenkins managed to pilot a potentially middling, by the books queer drama away from woe & despair mediocrity into an ultimately life-affirming adoption of Under the Skin levels of visual & aural abstraction. With Moonlight, he sidestepped an infinite number of filmmaking pitfalls to deliver something truly precious, a fascinating work the world is lucky to have seen materialize out of the mist.

-Brandon Ledet

Certain Women (2016)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

There’s a growing cult following for writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s work that I don’t yet fully understand, as I’ve only seen a couple of her pictures to date. As with the Michelle Williams canine drama Wendy & Lucy, perhaps Reichardt’s most well-known film, the recent release Certain Women didn’t quite hit me with the full, emotionally devastating force it has with some critics. For me, Reichardt’s work has the impact of an encroaching tide, not a crashing tidal wave. I leave her films quietly sad, subtly moved, but not rocked to my core. Certain Women finds Reichardt telling three separate stories in a loosely connected anthology, each vignette beginning & ending on an open, ominous note like the movie equivalent of distant, lightningless thunder. I understand how certain audiences can latch onto this less-is-more approach to storytelling and easily sink into Reichardt’s quiet, but confident filmmaking style, but I can never get past feeling like an appreciative observer, casually peeking into an uncovered windows as I stroll by unchanged, but intrigued.

Honestly, this is the kind of movie I would typically wait to watch until it reached a convenient at-home state of availability. There’s no visual poetry or genre thrill to Certain Women that’s especially enhanced by watching it large, loud, and with a crowd. I mostly turned up at the theater for this title because of the talent promised in the cast. Besides the consistently rewarding Reichardt alum Michelle Williams, Certain Women also boasts featured performances from Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern, two immensely talented & eternally undervalued actors I respect deeply. A great, front & center performance from Dern is always worth cherishing, considering the surprising rarity of her lead roles, but I have to admit Stewart’s inclusion is what really perked my ears in this case. Stewart has a quiet, measured presence in her dramatic roles I imagined would be a perfect fit for Reichardt’s own dedication to discipline & subtlety, an expectation that payed off nicely. Their pairing here makes for an all-too-appropriate director-actor team-up and, although I’ll readily admit I’m a much bigger fan of Stewart’s, I’d love to see them continue to work together on future projects just because their wavelengths are already so in sync.

Williams plays a contractor attempting to secure a delicate businesses deal for precious sandstone building materials she desires for her own home. Dern is a lawyer frustrated with an increasingly unhinged client who won’t accept the finality of a failed workman’s comp claim. Stewart, who is admittedly in the second bill slot in her segment, plays a young lawyer & night class teacher who becomes the unrequited target for flirtation from a lonely horse rancher. Each segment has stray themes and details that make them feel connected in a significant way: a shared character, a clear dichotomy between blue collar workers & their wealthy employers, the way men can undercut a woman’s authority without even noticing, etc. It’s really Reichardt’s understated gaze at desolate Midwestern expanse & small town relationships that makes the film function as a single unit, though. The routine of horses feeding, the dim lighting of strip malls & late night diners, a title credits scroll over a slow moving train; there’s a quiet frustration in Certain Women‘s imagery that links its individual parts together more than any of its overarching narratives strive to.

Kelly Reichardt guides this film with a confident command. As the writer, director, and editor, she holds a godlike control over the production that results in a work unmistakably her own, yet confoundingly light on stylistic flourish. Much like Todd Solondz’s recent anthology-style film Wiener-Dog, Certain Women finds a director delivering exactly what they’re known for, except dissected & presented in isolated pieces, almost like a career retrospective or an artist’s manifesto. A major difference, though, is that Reichardt’s work intentionally avoids grand, sweeping statements, so it’s all too easy to overlook the immensity of what’s covered in the film. Certain Women doesn’t aim for the earnest lyricism of an American Honey. It’s a very different portrait of Nowhere America, one deliberately dulled by an almost absent score & a filter of digital grain.

Personally, I usually look for a little visual poetry and cinematic escapism in my movies. Reichardt’s filmmaking style is a little outside my comfort zone, to put it mildly. I do think she has a great way of framing disciplined & meaningful performances from her actors, though. Williams, Dern, and Stewart all convey an impressive range of humanity here (along with Lily Gladstone, who is devastatingly effective as the horse rancher) without calling attention to themselves in a way a more obnoxious drama would invite. There’s a lot I admire in Reichardt’s work, but it’s the stage & environment she sets for her actors that keeps me coming back for more. I’ve yet to wholly fall in love with one of her films, but the dramatic performances they deliver consistently make the effort worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Paperhouse (1988)

/ swampflix / 20 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon, Alli, and Britnee watch Paperhouse (1988).

Boomer: Paperhouse is an odd little film. Helmed by Brit director Bernard Rose, the film follows the frenzied dreams of an artistic young girl, Anna (Charlotte Burke), as she finds herself flipping back and forth between the real world (where she is suffering from a glandular fever) and the fantasy world that is home to the titular paper house of her design. The lines between reality and unreality start to blur as she strikes up a friendship with Marc (Elliott Spiers), a disabled boy living in the otherworldly house and with no memory of life outside of it; when she learns from her physician (Gemma Jones) that Marc is real, things start to get more surreal and bizarre.

This wasn’t Rose’s directorial debut; he had previously worked in various roles on the last season of The Muppet Show and on The Dark Crystal before a short stint making music videos, most notably for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax.” After two smaller films that are largely forgotten, Rose directed Paperhouse, which was a perennial favorite on IFC in the early 2000s, before moving on to direct cult classic (and his only other truly great film) Candyman, released in 1992. Candyman is undeniably a horror film, and Paperhouse was largely lumped in with the horror genre upon home video release as well, despite not strictly deserving that distinction. It’s much more of a mood piece, with a relatively simple story elevated by striking visuals and a moodily beautiful score by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer (Rose certainly knows how to choose composers; Candyman’s Philip Glass soundtrack is so haunting that Glass apparently still makes royalties from it each year, no doubt helped by the fact that “Helen’s Theme” continues to appear in other genre works, most recently American Horror Story).

I love this film, and have seen it at least a half dozen times, but there is always enough time between each viewing that I forget that the film has a longer ending than I expect. For me, the film reaches its narrative conclusion when [spoiler alert] Anna learns that Marc has died. Although I’m not opposed to the resolution of Anna and her family (including her father, whose notable absence informs much of the psychological underpinnings of the film) returning to the seaside and revisiting a happier time, there is something about the ending that seems as little too pat, especially in light of the mildly silly scene in which Marc reappears to Anna. What do you think, Brandon? Did the ending seem out of place to you, or am I being too critical? Would you suggest a different conclusion?

Brandon: If I had to fault Paperhouse for anything it’d be the muddled nature of its central metaphor. The film operates in a spooky 80s kids’ movie headspace that I’m always a huge sucker for and the dream logic of both its set design & its eerie score is wonderfully chilling. There’s just something a little off in its dreamworld narrative that makes it difficult for me to track its overriding metaphor (not that I mind the ambiguity). Two sick children meet in the shared dreamworld set of a hand-drawn house and their recovery in the real world is dependent upon their progress in that fantasy space. Marc, who is unaware of this dichotomy despite Anna’s frequent explanations, suffers a fairly straightforward narrative where he slowly dies due to complications that arise through his muscular dystrophy. As Boomer points out, his death in the real world seems like a logical place for the story to end, but I do believe that the seaside resort epilogue was a necessary addition to the story, because Anna’s own struggle was at that point still largely unresolved.

Anna’s near-death experience with a glandular fever is what puts her in contact with the paperhouse fantasy where she meets Marc, but her true conflict is a mental health struggle related to her anxieties over an absent, alcoholic father. When Marc dies he rides a helicopter to heaven that relieves the real world pains of his body. In the seaside epilogue Anna tempted to leave behind her own pain by joining Marc in the helicopter, a moment that’s coded as a suicide attempt at the edge of a cliff. This last minute crisis might not make much sense in a typical three act story structure, but I do think Anna flirting with the relief of death is a powerful idea that Paperhouse would be lacking without, especially in its indication that her mental health struggle wasn’t instantly wiped away upon her father’s return.

Where I stumble a little in my reading of this conflict is in understanding the exact relationship between Anna & her father. Paperhouse explains the father figure to be a drunk & an abandoner in the real world, which is meant to explain Anna’s anxiety, lashing-out rebelliousness, and eventual disinterest in continuing to live. In the dreamworld, however, her father is far more abusive than that. Blinded by rage (both Anna’s & his own), Dream Dad strikes a terrifying nightmare of an image, destroying the physical objects Anna created & cherished with a hammer and physically beating her in the chest nearly to the point of death. No mention is ever made in the real world of Anna being physically abused by her father, but the brutality & specificity of the hammer & the chest-beating in the dreamworld at least makes it plausible that Anna was afraid that such abuse was a possibility. Coming back to Boomer’s original question, if there’s anything lacking in the ending for me it’s how easy Anna & her father’s seaside reconciliation feels after the brutality of their altercation in the dreamworld. Anna gets in the cathartic zinger, “You don’t have to be invisible to disappear, Dad,” but she does eventually forgive him after the helicopter/suicide crisis and the family is again made whole, which might be a little too neat & tidy of a conclusion given Anna’s near-fatal parental anxieties.

Britnee, how literal did you take the physical abuse in the dreamworld to be? Do you think it was intended as a reflection of something that happened in the real world or simply an amplification of Anna’s anxieties over her father’s alcoholism?

Britnee: One of the many mysteries in Paperhouse is the relationship between Anna and her father. Part of me feels as though the abuse in the dreamworld was more of a reflection of something Anna witnessed rather than something she experienced herself. If her father did indeed abuse her, I feel as though she would have been much more fearful of him in her dreams, but she wasn’t very scared of him considering how creepy the whole situation was. I really think she witnessed her father abusing her mother. Anna’s dreams allowed her to see the potential of her father’s alcoholism, and it really seemed like a big eye opener for her in the real world. There was something about the mannerisms of her mother that makes me believe she had a traumatizing experience with her husband. She seemed a bit shaky when she would light up her cigarettes, and she seemed to be in an entirely different world herself (perhaps Anna’s real world was her paperhouse?). I do agree with Brandon’s frustration with the very simple reunion at the end of the film. It actually made me a little nervous for Anna’s well-being; however, I’ve also been watching a lot of Dr. Phil lately, so that may have something to do with my uneasy thoughts about Anna and Drunk Dad.

What I found most interesting about Paperhouse was the confusing soundtrack. Brilliant, but so confusing. During the film’s opening credits, I was waiting for a dead body to fall out into the school hallway. I kept waiting for a gruesome, terrifying scene, but by the latter half of the film, I just gave up. There were a handful of scenes that were spooky, especially when Drunk Dad captures Anna in her dreamworld, but nothing was half as scary as the tunes in the background. Needless to say, I was surprised to find that the film fell way more on the drama side than on the horror.

Alli, did you feel as though the film’s score was out of place? Did the music add to the creepiness of Anna’s dreamworld? Did you get more horror vibes or fantasy vibes from that world?

Alli: Initially the score felt very spooky and out of place to me and definitely made me feel like more bad things were going to happen; but once in the dreamworld, it felt really appropriate. The low ominous synth sounds seem to enhance the vast emptiness you see around the house. What especially made the score work in the dreamworld was that at some points it became diegetic with the talking radio. While the idea of a talking mumbling radio seems reminiscent of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, here it was very creepy, as the nightmare dad seemed to be talking through it a little bit.

The dreamworld to me was very much a fantasy and an escape from the fact that she’s lonely at school and at home. While it starts off as something she can control very quickly it functions on it’s own bizarre logic, where some of the things she draws turn up very realistically and other things just are crooked and funny. It’s not until the faceless dad that it gets into nightmare zone, and even then he feels more like an intruder than an aspect of the dreamworld. In Anna’s life he is sort of an intruder, showing up whenever he feels like it both emotionally and physically.

But as much as the dad seems like a dark figure in Anna’s life, her mom is really not better at all. It’s no wonder she acts out with a mother who is as unsupportive as we see on screen. She criticizes Anna’s drawings very rudely and isn’t really nurturing at all until Anna is extremely ill, in a sort of trying to make it up to her way. Both parents seem to just make up for the lack of love with material things like riding lessons and manufactured happy trips to the seashore, which I think makes the ending more depressing and bitter.

Boomer, what did you think of the mom’s role? Is she just as bad as the dad or is she just a single mother at the end of her leash?

Boomer: I feel like we’re being more critical of both parents here than is called for, at least based on my reading of the film. Multiple times, we see how the dreamworld of the paperhouse is influenced by things that Anna sees or vaguely recalls, or by her physical circumstances in the real world. The reason that Anna feels like she is being beaten in the dreamworld is because, in the waking world, the paramedics are giving her compressions to keep her alive. The reason that her father appears as a backlit creepy shadow is because she encouraged her mother to let the photo of him at the beach develop for too long, until he becomes a dark figure in the image, and thus in her mind. The father doesn’t seem abusive to me, either to his wife or to Anna, so much as he is an unknowable being, his absence making him a figure that is half-remembered and half-imagined, larger than life but imposing.

The mother, for her part, reads more as a woman who’s been run ragged by holding down a household with a misbehaving young girl, suddenly stricken with illness. She has artistic pursuits of her own, as evidenced by her home dark room, and likely has had to sublimate her interest into being both breadwinner and full time caretaker to Anna due to her husband’s chronic and prolonged absence.

One of the things I like most about the film is the fact that no character is a paragon. As a heroine, Anna is a surprisingly postmodern. She’s a girl, but not feminized. She’s not stereotyped as drawing a dream house that’s reminiscent of the kind of future home girls are encouraged to imagine, but a strikingly dull building instead. She tries on make-up, but not to impress a boy; she just wants to try it for herself. Usually, female protagonists can only avoid being sexualized if they are infantilized (and, unfortunately, not even then), and although Anna is young, she’s not treated as an idealized perfect child. She lies, she throws tantrums, she skips school, and, most importantly, she’s not demonized for this either. These are just aspects of her character, not flaws that need to be corrected with external discipline, but that make up the gestalt that is Anna. Her mother, though her screentime is shorter than Anna’s, makes her seem fully-fleshed in her own way as well. She even seems genuinely loving, going so far as to dig through the whole building’s trash to placate what she must assume is some feverish madness.

Am I giving the film too much credit, Brandon? Am I making excuses for the movie because I like it, or have I convinced you that there’s more going on at the character level than there first appears?

Brandon: Please forgive me for the banality of this answer, but I think a lot of that ambiguity falls under the umbrella of personal interpretation. Paperhouse is in the most basic sense a story about lucid dreaming. Dream logic always comes with a certain level of impenetrable surrealism to it and there’s been an entire industry full of psychologist “experts” built around the therapeutic benefits of dream interpretation. Then there’s the film’s art therapy element, in which Anna creates a personal space for herself where she can exude total control as an omnipotent (and highly fallible) god. Both the weird dream logic & the art therapy surrealism of the film’s basic plot leave Paperhouse with a lot of room for personal interpretation in its symbolism, especially once Anna’s drawings start affecting real world change in Marc’s medical condition. Personally, I see a drunk dad who scares Anna (who points out his alcoholism in the darkroom scene) and a mother who may be frazzled, but is not at all abusive (as evidenced in the manic trash-digging scene). I also read a third act suicide attempt at the edge of the cliff, but I’ll willingly admit that I’m reaching for a solid explanation for an intentionally lyrical moment there, which may be the wrong way to go about things in this movie.

So much of this movie is literally in Anna’s head that it’s near impossible to tell what’s “really” happening from minute to minute. How much of our darker interpretations of the parents’ behavior is being influenced by the horror film dread of Myers & Zimmer’s score? How much of the dreamworld content is merely, as Boomer suggests, reflections of images Anna encounters throughout the day, as many dreams tend to be? There’s no “true” answers to these questions, as the film intentionally deals in ambiguity. There’s evidence that Anna’s dreamworld surrogate was truly communicating with Marc’s, a boy she never met in a physical space, but everything else is left open-ended. The film kind of works like a coloring book: it provides a basic outline of how its world works and invites its audience to color in the details. Maybe we’ve been coloring a little outside the lines in our personal interpretations here, but I think the movie invites that kind misbehavior. I also don’t believe that misbehavior is a detriment to either of the central characters, though, as I never felt like I lost track of Marc or Anna as complex, multifaceted human beings. It’s their own personal interpretations of the adults in their lives that throw off our perception as an audience & complicate some of the film’s intent & metaphor.

Britnee, I’m getting some flashbacks to our Movie of the Month conversation about Black Moon here, particularly in our attempts to parse out what the film specifically “means.” Instead of picking apart an intentionally inscrutable art film, though, we’re discussing a movie that was ostensibly made with a very young audience in mind. Do you think the darkness & ambiguity helps the film in this case, considering the flexible imaginations of the children intended to see it? As adults, are we reading more solid, static interpretations of the film’s metaphor than we might have as kids, when Paperhouse could possibly have survived purely on mood instead of concrete symbolism?

Britnee:  While I was in college, I took a history class that focused on the 1960s, and most of that course involved watching films, such as Go Tell the Spartans and Easy Rider, and writing about them. Before viewing each film, my professor would say, “Remember, every detail, whether major or minor, in a film means something. There is symbolism everywhere.” That really stuck with me, and since then I always feel somewhat guilty if I don’t search for meaning behind every little detail in a movie. I’m glad that Brandon brought up the point that this is a film intended for a younger audience. I need to remind myself every now and then that sometimes (maybe even most of the time), films are created solely for the purpose of pleasure and entertainment.

Ignoring the interpretations we made of Anna’s dreamworld as well as her relationship with her parents (Drunk Dad in particular) and viewing the film through the eyes of a child, Paperhouse seems a bit more whimsical. A film about drawings that come to life in dreams and a magical friendship that only exists in the dreamworld seems a lot better than a film about a girl with neglectful and abusive parents. Paperhouse becomes another film entirely. Even the darker elements of the film take on a new meaning. Anna’s scary dream father becomes a product of a mistake in her magical drawing instead of an abusive parent turned villain. As for the darkness and ambiguity of the film, I think it actually contributes to the film’s fantasy elements and makes it much more exciting for the intended adolescent audience. If I was eight years old watching Paperhouse for the first time, my imagination would be running wild during those scenes in Anna’s dreamworld.

Alli, I was really irritated by the mystery between Anna and Marc’s friendship. If only we were able to know if Marc was having his own recurring dream with Anna. What if they were possibly sharing the same dream? The fact that we will never know just kills me. What are your thoughts on the telepathic connection between Anna and Marc? Would you have enjoyed seeing Marc’s side of things?

Alli: I think the interesting thing about Anna and Marc’s friendship is that he has no knowledge of the world outside the dream, which leads me to believe that he was kind of subconsciously called there. Not to try to make too much technical sense of dream logic, it seems like they are sharing a dream, but since he’s less in control of it he is much more wrapped up in the dream state. Like Brandon said Paperhouse seems to be about lucid dreaming. It would be a lot harder for Marc’s dream-self to be aware what’s going on. For him, this is probably just a really crappy dream where instead of being a fantastic escape he’s still sick and unable to walk and there’s this girl urging him to be happy. As we’ve already said, we’re very sympathetic with Anna though and it’s hard to fault a girl for accidentally summoning a sick boy into her dream. I think not knowing Marc’s side of things gives us an opportunity to watch Anna grow more from her perspective. Not seeing Marc’s side, we’re figuring him out as she is. By doing that this film really captures the vulnerability of making friends as kids with kid emotions. They’re so tumultuous and dramatic, because kids are still figuring out themselves and their own boundaries.

I’m going to dare to interpret the dream logic more and say that a lot of these volatile, underdeveloped emotions are mirrored in the dreams. Her dream house is bare. The dreams themselves go from just having a conversation to terrifying faceless dream dad pretty quickly.  As traumatic as they were, the dream conflicts help Anna find more of herself. These dreams are so hard and scary because figuring out yourself is hard and scary. She learns more how to honestly interact with people and to take responsibility for her actions. She learns empathy, which is really hard for kids to learn, by talking to Marc. As she learns more about herself and matures, the dreams become more fleshed out and less bleak. 

EPSON MFP image

Lagniappe

Brandon: Paperhouse reminds me of a very specific time in 80s children media where stories were allowed to be dark & ambiguous in a way that a lot of the more sanitized kids’ movies of late wouldn’t dare. Titles like The NeverEnding Story, Lady in White, and Return to Oz all specifically came to mind while watching the film, but I have to admit I think it’s closest comparison point was released in 2005. The Dave McKean & Neil Gaiman collaboration MirrorMask is a children’s fantasy film in which a young girl feels immense guilt over fighting with her mother before they’re separated by a sudden illness. She wrestles with this anxiety during an extended dream in which she enters & explores a world she drew by hand in her own bedroom. Sound familiar? MirrorMask is a little more obvious & blunt in its central metaphor & a lot more expansive in its dream space, but otherwise the pair make interesting companion pieces.I think if you really enjoyed one, it’d be more than worthwhile to seek out the other.

Alli: I also thought of MirrorMask, and its terrifying dreamworld, but another Neil Gaiman creation came to mind as well, Coraline, which is another story about a girl upset at her parents entering a dreamworld with duplicate parents. The terrifying Other Mother is reminiscent of faceless dad. But there’s another similarity for me. One disappointing thing the Coraline movie did that deviated from the book was to add in the male character, Wybie, that besides being a sidekick also seems to have an unnecessary crush on Coraline. And that kind of touches on my one gripe with Paperhouse. I kind of wished that Anna and Marc hadn’t become crushes and just remained friends. You so rarely see male-female friendships in movies.

Britnee: I feel really bad for being so rough on Anna’s father. He was probably just a really nice, hardworking man that has to sacrifice spending time with his family to make a decent living. Instead of seeing that initially, I jumped to conclusions and labeled him as an alcoholic and abusive father. Shame on me.

Boomer: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading the father as an alcoholic, as there is certainly reference to his drinking in the text. That having been said, the mind of our main character (and perhaps all children) has a tendency to exaggerate the real world, as evidenced in the way that things become larger than life in the dreaming, and that’s how I interpret that particular nuance. Still, although that’s my reading of the text, the other readings are certainly valid as well.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
December: Alli presents Last Night (1999)

January: The Top Films of 2016

-The Swampflix Crew

American Honey (2016)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

American Honey was a very specific kind of disappointment for me, a type of letdown I only ever seem to find in buzzed-about indie releases. For months, the critical narrative surrounding this film has been that it’s intensely divisive. Even the film’s trailer, with all of its Shia LaBeouf-with-a-rat-tail earnestness & musings on the joys of making money/getting turnt, promised a production that could elicit a strong love it or hate it reaction. I went into American Honey expecting intensity, so I was oddly disappointment when I mostly found it to be fairly okay. Normally, enjoying a movie on the whole, but not finding it to be too big of a deal would still be a totally worthwhile, even comfortable cinematic experience. With titles like American Honey, Gaspar Noe’s Love, and The Revenant, however, the expectation is to have an extreme reaction, positive or negative, and it’s kind of a bummer when they don’t deliver on the divisiveness promised by their reputations.

Part of the reason films like this are such a letdown when they’re only moderately enjoyable is that they require so much work from the audience’s end. American Honey is deliberately light on plot, yet stretches nearly three hours in length. Its squared-off aspect ratio and daydreamy tendency to get lost in traditional beauty detail like hair blowing in the wind & flowers waving off the side of the highway play more like a lengthy scroll through an Instagram account than a feature film. The movie asks you to hang out in a closed space with Shia LaBeouf for hours on end; while LaBeouf is actually serviceable at worst here, that’s still a lot to ask from some people in light of his James Franco x1000 Misunderstood Artist public persona. The film clears these potential hurdles with ease, avoiding a lot of eyeroll-worthy indie movie cheese with a decidedly laidback, candid tone. However, its overall effect of capturing the directionless drift of a never-ending road trip might not be worth the headache required to get on its wavelength. If you meet American Honey halfway to buy what it’s selling (magazines or otherwise), the best you can hope for is a warm, comfortable meandering through America’s dead spaces and a visit with the young ghosts who haunt them. It’s an enjoyable experience, but one with a hefty toll.

A van full of teenage castaways tour America selling magazine subscriptions door to door, parking lot to parking lot. Although they could not care less about the product they’re peddling, the operation is handled like a “legitimate” business. They have orientation rituals, meetings, big seller rewards, and a boss figure who stands to benefit the most from their sweat & persistence as they remain fixed in their economic standing. These are America’s throwaway kids, drifters. They hitchhike, sport dreadlocks, dumpster dive for raw chicken, self-medicate with a steady diet of bong rips & grain alcohol. In the film’s more unique moments it strives only to see the country through their eyes. Economic desperation drives them down dusty roads, through cheap motels, and hundreds of miles past the families who abandoned or abused them. In their words, they “explore America, party, a bunch of stuff. It’s cool.” In our eyes it’s not cool at all; it’s depressing. The movie attempts to construct a will-they-won’t-they romance between two of the kids (LaBeouf’s mostly-nude body being part of that bargain) and to find moments of intense physical & emotional vulnerability in its narrative tangents, but it can never fully escape its status as a delicate, laidback hangout film, with all of the underwhelming impact that distinction entails.

British director Andrea Arnold captured this downstream drift with just as loose of a battle plan as you’d expect. In her own first tour of America, she’s acting as a sort of explorer/partier herself, packing the van with real-life drifter kid non-actors, which makes for some truly effective moments of quiet devastation. Sometimes she can reach a little too far in her attempts to capture America’s spirit. Her camera’s strange fascination with the mechanical ritual of line-dancing makes for a bizarre moment of authentic detail, but we also get shots of wildflowers juxtaposed with the blood river runoffs of slaughterhouses that really test the resolve not to roll eyes & walk away. There’s a sort of sweet, childish sensuality in the physical flirtation that builds the central romance, but the entire courtship is sparked with the lovelorn pair making eyes to Rihanna singing “We fell in love in a hopeless place,” which is just about the least subtle music cue possible; and I’m saying that as someone who typically places no significant value on subtlety. When the kids are daydreaming & sing-shouting along to the same endless repetitions of songs by Kevin Gates, Juicy J, and the like, Arnold captures something convincingly true & brutally sad about these nomadic ragamuffins pursuing an eternal road trip to escape the inevitability of “real life.” When she starts peppering the scenario with loaded guns, stolen cars, and soul-shattering romance, the movie loses its footing a little and resembles something much more generic & familiar.

The overall result, then, is a mixed bag. American Honey winds up being enjoyable, but maybe not worth all of the trouble it takes to reap its smaller, more delicate benefits. Like I said, calling a film out for being merely enjoyable is a strange complaint to get hung up on, but I’m honestly jealous of the folks who had a strong reaction to it, either way that response swung. I wish I could call this film high art or low trash, but I instead find myself drifting between the two extremes, mumbling half-remembered rap lyrics to myself & hazily waiting for my next drink.

-Brandon Ledet

Krisha (2016)

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

fourstar

As I mentioned in my less-than-thrilled review of Knight of Cups, I just don’t have the capacity within me to fall in love with a Terrence Malick flick. Yet, I keep returning to the director’s work because there’s so much promise in his raw material. Turns out the answer to this self-conflict might actually be to follow the career of Malick’s collaborators rather than to keep returning to a director that continually burns me. Tree of Life was one of my all-time most disappointing trips to the theater, but it did introduce me to the wonderful talents of actor Jessica Chastain & cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, both of whom I have been keeping a close eye on ever since. What’s even more surprising, though, is the out of nowhere talent of young writer/director Trey Edward Shults, who had worked on the sets of Malick productions Tree of Life, Weightless, Voyage of Time, To the Wonder, and *shudder* Knight of Cups, but just made his own debut film Krisha. In his very first feature film effort the young talent has, in my my mind, beaten Malick at his own game. Malick has an undeniable talent at constructing an image & a hypnotic tone, but his intensifying disinterest in narrative has left his films dull & meaningless experiences for me. Trey Edward Shults obviously paid close attention to how to evoke the potency of Malick’s raw material, but repurposes it for a clear, deeply personal narrative that makes its impact count for something. Krisha doesn’t always resembles the tone poem hypnosis of a Malick work, but when it chooses to use that cinematic mode as a storytelling tool it makes the impact count for more than any 30 seconds of a Malick film ever has in the past.

A lot of what drives home the impact of Krisha is the heart aching sincerity. The film’s central story is based on a real life tragedy in Shults’s family, stars his family, and is filmed in his parent’s home. This is an undeniably cheap-looking production, but the pain & anguish it reveals transcends its means. A woman returns to the cautiously open arms of her anxious family after a ten year separation & estrangement. There’s a mystery to the past trauma that has kept the estranged family member, Krisha, as an arm’s length black sheep, an ambiguous separation represented by the image of a deformed finger & the occasional tense accusation of her “selfishness” & “abandonment.” Although the exact circumstances of Krisha’s departure are never made explicitly clear, she does carry the faux-spiritual air of a recovering addict, calling her GPS “a lying bitch” in one breath & then claiming that she’s “working on becoming a more spiritual person” in the next. As the mounting tension of her tentative return to the fold escalates along with the stress inherent to orchestrating even the most congenial Thanksgiving meal, Krisha seems to be slowly barreling towards a relapse into abuse (both substance & familial), like a turkey slowly reaching the right temperature on an oven rack. The layering of tension in Krisha is methodical & deceptively casual. Once the pressure is released, however, it’s difficult to think back to a moment when the film felt at all civil or tightly contained. The Malickian looseness of the film’s final act is lightly suggested throughout, but once the Shults goes for broke with the tactic it almost feels as if the film had always been that way, just as its titular antagonist had never truly been “spiritual” or reformed.

Besides Shults’s strong command of image & tone, a lot of what makes Krisha stand out is the titular performance from his real-life aunt, Krisha Fairchild. Her stressed-out addict’s faux hippie costume of serenity & acceptance is a bravely difficult balance to toe, especially considering the metatextual factoid that she’s portraying a real-life member of her family. Krisha’s pathetic attempts to make herself useful in the kitchen or to personally connect with individual members of a family she does not know would be absolutely devastating if it weren’t coming from such a phony, selfish place. Other non-actors in the film give memorably great, effective performances, most notably a grandmother figure who makes the horrors of dementia feel way too real, but this is undeniably Krisha Fairchild’s show. The film opens with her starkly framed & vulnerably staring down the audience, somewhat similar to Thomasin in The Witch, and the performance gets no more vain or glamorous from there. It’s a truly unique mode of self-effacement for grim, unblinking, deeply personal art.

I may have been overselling the Malick vibes of Krisha a little too hard in my opening screed here, mostly based on the fact that I watched it so soon after Knight of Cups, a film it surpasses in intensity & impact with so few brushstrokes, not to mention that Shults had worked on both films. Without that connection you could surely find other works for easy comparison points. The arrhythmic score & cacophonous soundtrack of dogs barking & familial chattering recalls the insufferable sonic tension Paul Thomas Anderson punishes his audience with in Punch Drunk Love. The mood-evoking images of a turkey grotesquely getting prepared for the oven & general search for an open-ended, eerie tone brought me back to the terror in the ordinary established in this year’s surprise knockout punch The Fits. If you go into Krisha expecting a Malick derivative you’re going to be severely underwhelmed & agitated. Instead of copying the director’s feature length search of tone poem submersion in pure, disjointed imagery, Krisha uses that narrative approach as one of many tools in its back pocket, only to be wielded when it’s most useful.

For a first time filmmaker with an obvious eye for powerful imagery, Trey Edward Shults shows a surprising amount of restraint, saving his showier moments of technical prowess for when they best serve the story he’s telling. That story is a familial drama turned into a psychological horror of ambiguous, tension, one Shults & his family apparently had already lived through once off-camera. It’s a fascinating debut that far exceeds its obvious financial limitations and I’d much rather watch whatever the young talent has lined up next then another navel gazer of a slog like Knight of Cups, a film that’s only proven its value by inspiring better art in other works.

-Brandon Ledet