drama

Amateur (1994)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

“How can you be a nymphomaniac and never had sex?”
“I’m choosy.”

The Criterion Channel has been doing a great job of resurrecting a forgotten generation of once-respected Gen-X indie filmmakers whose work has been weirdly difficult to see in recent years – names like Atom Egoyan, Gregg Araki, and Hal Hartley.  During the glory days of independent film festivals and college radio chic, these low-budget, mid-notoriety auteurs enjoyed a surprising level of cultural mystique that has faded as the distribution of their work has effectively trickled into non-existence.  Maybe that break wasn’t all so bad for their memory & reputation, though.  Revisiting Hal Hartley’s filmography as a Criterion Channel micro-collection in the streaming age feels like taking a time machine back to the Classic Indie Filmmaking days of the 1990s.  In particular, there’s something charmingly quaint about how his low-effort crime picture Amateur functions as a relic of that era.  Every one of his characters loiter around public spaces smoking cigarettes, flipping through porno mags, and making deadpan quips over background tracks by PJ Harvey & Liz Phair.  It’s cute in its own grimy little way, a dusty souvenir of 90s slacker kitsch.

The “amateur” of the title could refer to any one of the main players in Hartley’s off-Broadway, on-camera stage drama.  Isabelle Huppert plays an ex-nun who’s learning a new trade as a writer of porno-mag erotica.  Elina Löwensohn plays a video store porno actress who’s trying to break away from the industry by making big moves as a self-employed gangster.  Martin Donovan is caught between them as a total amnesiac with a violent past – an amateur at basically everything due to his newfound medical condition.  The unlikely trio eventually find themselves “on the run from bloodthirsty corporate assholes” as they cross paths with the gangsters at the top of the porno industry food chain, a mistake that has them evading handcuffs & bullets.  This premise sounds like it might make for an exciting, sordid action thriller—and maybe it still could—but that kind of entertainment is not on Amateur‘s agenda.  Mostly, Hartley uses the plot as an excuse to have his characters lounge around in hip NYC fashions (styled as a relapsed Catholic pervert, a soft goth, and a business prick, respectfully) while listening to college radio classics by the likes of The Jesus Lizard, Pavement, and My Blood Valentine.

There might be some genuine thematic heft in Amateur that I’m not taking seriously here, something about how New York City is a dangerous playground where desperate transplants reinvent themselves.  That might have resonated with me more if it were NYC community theatre instead of a Hal Hartley film preserved in time.  I mostly found myself distracted by just how Totally ’90s the movie was in its search for contemporary cool cred.  Its gigantic cellphones, breakfast diner ashtrays, and business cards for phone sex lines were all just as specific to its status as an Indie 90s relic as its single-scene cameo from a loud-mouthed Parker Posey.  This is a movie with multiple recurring arguments about why “floppy discs” are neither floppy, nor circular.  Everyone is either absurdly angry or wistfully despondent in a perfectly Gen-X 90s kind of way, and there’s a lot of easy humor pulled from the clash between those two default attitudes.  It’s an easy era to feel nostalgia for as a movie nerd, if not only because people like Hartley, Egoyan, and Araki used to get relatively robust distribution & critical attention, as opposed to the current cinematic landscape where you’re either making over-advertised corporate IP slop or disposable streaming service filler.  We used to be a country, a proper country with a proper indie cinema scene, and the proof is currently streaming on Criterion.

-Brandon Ledet

The Holdovers (2023)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Every year, I get into a discussion with at least one person about the fact that I don’t much care for Christmas music. There are a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, I grew up in a household in which we were only allowed to listen to one radio station, one that was Contemporary Christian music 10.5 months of the year and nothing but the same 30-40 Christmas songs in the six weeks leading up to Christmas. It wasn’t as if you were going to hear anything tongue-in-cheek on 92.7 “The Bridge,” which means no “Santa Baby,” no Chipmunks, no mothers kissing Santa Claus or grandmothers getting run over by reindeer; you might get something haunting and ethereal that you wouldn’t get on a mainstream station like Amy Grant’s “Breath of Heaven” to almost make up for the dearth of otherwise worthwhile material, but that was about it. Add in that they didn’t even have more than one version of the standards that they did have, and it was a monotonous time. Secondly, I often find that people who have positive associations with Christmas have never had a job working retail, which means that they’ve never heard the same unimaginative version of “Little Drummer Boy” six times while manning an eight-hour shift at the cash register at Urban Outfitters (or worse, the Nook nook at Barnes & Noble, where you attempt to convince people who just came in to get a copy of Green Eggs and Ham for their niece to buy a less-functional iPad at the same price point), which will kill any fondness you might have had for a song. Still, every year, my best friend and I watch The Muppet Christmas Carol, and it’s part of our tradition that sometime during “It Feels Like Christmas” I turn to her and say “Y’know, I think this is my favorite Christmas carol. Not my favorite Christmas Carol adaptation, but like my favorite Christmas song,” and she says “Y’know, you say that every year.” That film came out allllll the way back in 1992, and although there have been a few other Christmas movies that have come out since whose appeal was universal (Elf), blandly inoffensive in a corporate way (The Santa Clause), or bizarre (Krampus) enough to be considered part of the Christmas Movie Canon (at least to some), they are few and far between. We may have a new one with The Holdovers, though. 

It’s almost Christmas, 1970, at the New England boarding school Barton Academy. Junior Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is excited to spend his winter break in Saint Kitts with his family, even packing up a pair of beach briefs that he describes as the most masculine thing that he could wear, as they’re the same as the ones James Bond wore in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. On the last (half) day of the term, the strict and authoritarian ancient civilizations professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) “generously” offers to let one of his classes, comprised mostly of boys who have failed the midyear exam, to take a retest upon their return, although there will be new material on that test, which means more studying during their vacation. Both of their Christmas plans are derailed, however. When one of his peers fakes a relative’s illness to get out of chaperoning the “holdovers” (boys who will be staying at the school rather than returning to their parents for the holidays), Hunham is enlisted to perform these duties, and he is all but told outright by the school’s headmaster Dr. Woodrip (Andrew Garman) that this is in retaliation for his refusal to give a passing grade to the son of a senator, costing Barton one of its largest donors. While waiting for his pickup, Tully receives a phone call from his mother, canceling their family trip at the last minute so that she can spend this time as a late honeymoon with the boy’s new stepfather, thus leaving him as one of the aforementioned holdovers, all of whom will be bunking in the infirmary as the dorms and school building will be without heat for the duration, for cost-saving reasons. The only other person who will be around consistently is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria manager, who is hesitant to leave the last place that she spent time with her late son Curtis, who was recently killed in action in Vietnam. 

Although there are initially five students at Barton for Christmas, that number is whittled down to just Angus when one of the other boys’ father, a mogul of some kind, comes to collect his son for a ski trip and takes the other boys along, with Angus’s mother being unreachable on her vacation in order to give permission for him to go. When Angus injures himself while leading Paul on a chase around the school building, he is taken to the hospital, where he lies to cover for Paul and prevent the older man from losing his job, although he says he will call on the return of an equivalent favor one day. While eating in town on the way back, they encounter Lydia (Carrie Preston), Dr. Woodrip’s assistant, who tells them that she picks up a few shifts waiting tables over the holidays every year, and invites them to her Christmas party. They take her up on her offer and attend the party along with Mary, and while Angus hits it off with Lydia’s niece, Paul falls into the trap of being optimistic about Lydia’s potential to be attracted to him only to discover she has a boyfriend, and Mary drinks too much and has a breakdown about the loss of her son in the house’s kitchen. She’s not too drunk to tell Paul off about how he’s treating Angus. This eventually leads to the two taking a field trip into Boston after Christmas, but one of the stops they make along the way ends up having consequences that neither of them could have predicted. 

Paul Hunham is a fascinating character. We’re not meant to like him very much at first, and I think that he’s off-putting in that he represents the version of ourselves that we fear others see: unattractive, smelly, clumsy, incapable of telling a story. Our sympathy for him grows, however, as the pieces of his life fall into place as he and Angus get to know one another and open up to each other more: abusive father, scholarship to Barton Academy at age fifteen, went on to an Ivy League school where his more privileged roommate deflected his own plagiarism by framing Paul and Paul’s subsequent retaliation costing him his education. He returned to Barton, where he was given a position by a kindly former headmaster who saw his potential, only to now be serving at the leisure of a man who was once his own pupil. His backstory also intertwines with Mary’s, as she reveals that although Curtis likewise was able to attend Barton on scholarship, but upon graduation, he wasn’t able to go straight into university like his rich classmates and enlisted in the service in order to attend school on the G.I. Bill when he returned — but he didn’t come back. Along with Angus, who didn’t grow up in wealth and is only in attendance at Barton because his mother’s new husband is wealthy, they are the outsiders amongst the elite. In contrast, school’s effortlessly charming quarterback is initially left at the school by his father because the boy refuses to cut his long blond 1970s hair, but when he hears the helicopter approaching the school, he exclaims that he knew his father would break first, and he returns to school after break with a shorn head. Unlike the tragedies of the lives of our three leads, his troubles are shallow and silly, as his father’s feud was over nothing more than vanity and was resolved with no real loss since the boy was being stubborn about his hair because, in a world where you really have no other problems, what else are you going to fight about? 

If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Wait, didn’t I hear that this movie was a comedy?” you are correct, it is; it’s just my nature to get hung up on the melancholy parts of these kinds of dramedies. Now that it’s addressed, it’s worth noting that this movie is, in fact, hilarious. Sessa is fantastic, a breakout freshman performance from an unknown actor who just happened to audition for the movie because he attended the school at which it was being filmed. There’s a scene late in the film when Paul is sitting at a bowling alley bar and he attempts to talk to two of the Bostonians there, a bartender and a regular dressed as Santa. He attempts to ingratiate himself with them by delivering a rambling monologue about how Santa should be dressed according to Grecian tradition, and although it’s exactly the kind of thing that would be very annoying behavior from a stranger at the bar, Giamatti plays it with the perfect intermix of attempted frivolity and joviality with witless, unobservant boorishness that it’s impossible not to be charmed by it in spite of oneself. Sessa manages to do the same with Angus, making him a triumphant example of a kid who’s too smart for his own good but is also struggling with rejection from his peers and his lack of friends in spite of his good nature underneath. It’s a very charming form of humor, and it works just as well as all of the great physical comedy that is going on around it (special mention to Paul Hunham’s absolutely pathetic attempt to throw a football). 

We throw the phrase “instant classic” around a lot these days. I’ve said it myself about things that didn’t stand the test of time and which have faded into obscurity. I don’t know if we’ll be able to look back on this one in ten years and say that it’s part of the canon, but I do know that I’ll be watching it one year from now, and that’s good enough for me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

FYC 2023: Wrasslin’ Weepies

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Unsurprisingly, a lot of this year’s major Awards Frontrunners are solemn biopics of men who committed some of the worst sins in human history: the invention of the atom bomb, the daily operation of concentration camps, the genocide of an Indigenous nation.  As much as The Academy has attempted to reconfigure what qualifies as an Oscar-Worthy movie, it’s clear that the Oscar-friendly template of Important Men directing history lessons about Important Men is still an effective one; all that’s really changed is that those portraits of Important Men have become more critical than celebratory.  Further down the power rankings of this FYC season’s major players, there’s also a curious pair of historical biopics about Important Men who operated in a much smaller arena than the frontrunners’ global politics stomping grounds: the regional pro wrestling circuit of 1980s Texas.  The men depicted in these pro wrasslin’ biopics are of much smaller historical importance than a J. Robert Oppenheimer or a Rudolf Höss; the tearjerking melodrama of their lives is less about the moral sins of their own actions than it is about how cruelly unfair the world was to them, and whether they survived the trauma.  However, in a big picture sense, they echo the same criticism of the rigid machismo and the hypocrisy in Family Values conservatism that drove the Important Men of Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flowers Moon, and The Zone of Interest to commit humanity’s greatest.  They just work through that cultural tragedy within the walls of their small family homes and within the rubber-padded ropes of the wrestling ring.  It’s more contained.

If this season’s pro wrestling dramas are being contextualized as awards-hopefuls, they’re most overtly engineering FYC attention for their male stars.  In that way, pro wrestling is the perfect cinematic subject, since it offers such a familiar, convenient storytelling template to help get male performers over with the crowd.  Even when a wrasslin’ pictures’s in-movie drama feels minor in comparison to more historically important works, their in-ring drama carries the audience through, highlighting an actors’ talents with the emotional histrionics of a soap opera or a Greek tragedy.  Nobody benefits from that dramatic bolstering this year more than Gabriel García Bernal, who stars as the titular lead in the lucha libre history lesson Cassandro.  This by-the-numbers biopic isn’t half as stylistically daring as the Cassandro, el Exótico! documentary on the same subject, nor as fabulously glamorous as the luchador himself, but it’s an inherently cinematic story and García Bernal shines in the central role.  The real-life Cassandro is credited for changing the artform of lucha libre by subverting the homophobic trope of the “exótico.”  When he entered the business wrestling on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, exóticos were a purely homophobic stereotype: heels who would earn cheap heat by flirting with their more traditionally macho opponents, then get immediately crushed in the ring to the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers.  It was gaybashing as ceremonial pageantry.  Cassandro flipped the script by genuinely getting over with the crowd through the artistry of his wrestling, to the point where promoters saw potential profits in letting an exótico win for a change; or, that’s at least how the story goes, according to kayfabe.  The beyond-the-mat drama of his struggles with a loving but homophobic mother and with sex-partner colleagues who are willing to fuck him in private but renounce him in public can feel a little phony & cliche to anyone who’s seen their share of queer indie dramas in the past few decades.  The nonstop montage of Cassandro’s career in the ring is still emotionally compelling in a succinct, celebratory, wrasslin’-specific way that makes up for those broad cliches, though, and by the time the credits roll it’s hard to tell whether you’re rooting for Cassandro or rooting for García Bernal – an FYC publicist’s dream.

The Von Erich family drama The Iron Claw spreads the FYC wealth to many more potential nominees than Cassandro‘s fixed spotlight on Gabriel García Bernal.  The improbable true story of the supposedly “cursed” family of professional wrestlers has plenty of star-making tragedy to spread around its four central brothers: Zac Efron as Kevin Von Erich, Jeremy Allen White as Kerry Von Erich, Harris Dickinson as David Von Erich, and Stanley Simons as David Von Erich.  Efron is the most obvious awards play of the group, transforming himself into a human He-Man action figure for the role in a grotesque way that awards bodies love to celebrate.  Each of the Von Erich brothers get their moment to bring the audience to tears, though, as they’re each pushed to the brink of what their hearts and bodies can handle by their toxically macho father Fritz Von Erich, played with monstrous villainy by Holt McCallany.  The first half of the movie recalls the laidback nostalgic cool of Dazed and Confused as the four central brothers lean on each other for warmth & validation in the happiest times of their lives, working together as up & coming wrestlers who have yet to be fully poisoned by their father’s insistence they compete amongst themselves for his scraps of praise.  The second half disrupts that momentary bliss with the heightened violence of a Greek tragedy, with each brother meeting improbably horrific ends in a rapid, relentless procession.  The Iron Claw‘s reliance on the in-ring drama of pro wrestling is heaviest in the early stretch, as the Von Erichs’ prominence in pre-WWF regional wrasslin’ circuits is mapped out in montage & dramatic recreations of select, pivotal matches.  The back half is a much more straightforward drama that could have befallen any sports-family household, since cataloging the parade of traumas that crushed the Von Erichs leaves very little time to show them actually doing the work.  Besides, the movie isn’t really about their wrestling careers anyway; it’s more about the love they shared as brothers, and how important that bond was in a home run by a man incapable of expressing affection.  If it were any less successful as a sincere family drama, the men’s frequent repetition of the word “Brother” would play as a joke, the same way audiences now laugh every time Vin Diesel says “Family” in the Fast & Furious movies.

If this were a one-on-one, three-count fight, it would be a squash match.  Cassandro is dramatically and stylistically outperformed by The Iron Claw by practically every metric – except, maybe, in the vintage-glam detail of Cassandro’s gemstoned ring gear.  Neither film is an exceptional work of great artistic importance, though; they’re both just FYC acting showcases for their above-the-line talents, who utilize pro-wrestling’s played-to-the-cheap-seats pageantry to add some emotional heft to otherwise traditional sports dramas.  If they have any standing in discussion with the Oscar-hopefuls who’ve risen to the top of the Vegas-odds rankings over the course of this FYC season, it’s in their shared skepticism over the effects of stoic masculinity and conservative Family Values in recent generational history.  Cassandro finds a way to offer a triumphant rejection of those traditional values, while The Iron Claw drags our battered hearts through their most miserable consequences.  In either case, their performers are never more powerful nor more beautiful than they are on the wrestling mat, and both films are excellent examples of acting as full-body physical artistry.  If I have to watch straightforward, mediocre melodramas to keep up with the buzziest titles in the Oscars Cycle every year, I’d be more than happy if they’d continually return to the wrestling ring for easy crowd work and promotion.  It gives us something easy to root for, which is honestly something I’d rather put myself through than yet another war atrocity drama about the worst things that have ever happened in the history of the human species.

-Brandon Ledet

Stroszek (1977)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Stroszek is a relentlessly downbeat tragicomedy about one man’s inability to escape the prison of society. The film opens with Bruno Stroszek being released from prison, where the kindly warden makes him promise to never drink again, as the street performer’s only crimes were all related to or caused by his alcoholism. As soon as he departs the office, however, he goes straight to a local pub, where the bartender recognizes him and greets him (as) warmly (as 1970s German stoicism allows), despite the fact that Stroszek has been gone for two and a half years. Stroszek attempts to greet Eva, a woman he knew before, but the two men with her reveal themselves as her pimps and send him on his way, but not before he offers to let her come and stay with him in the apartment that his old neighbor Mr. Scheitz has kept for him. Stroszek attempts to return to street performance, but there’s little love for the vagabond who can never remember to zip his fly, and although Eva does find her way to him and tries to help him spruce up the place, this ultimately leads to further harassment and beatings at the hands of her former pimps. Unable to turn to the police for help, Mr. Scheitz offers to let Eva and Stroszek accompany him to Wisconsin, where he is moving to live with his nephew for his remaining few years, and he even gets jobs for them as a waitress and a mechanic, respectively. 

Upon initial arrival in the states, the trio feels a rush of excitement and possibility while sightseeing around New York before they purchase an old car and make their way to the prairie town of Railroad Flats, an indistinguishable little spot of nowhere, a barren place of dead grass brown and dirty snow. Scheitz’s nephew is amenable to them, and things start out well for them at first despite the humility of their surroundings, as Eva finds her new line of work much more agreeable than her old, and Stroszek gets along with his equally alcoholic colleagues, and the nephew Scheitz even lets them set up a mobile home on his property to give them a leg up. The elder Scheitz is considered a bit of a curiosity around town, but the townsfolk are more bemused than annoyed at his wandering around and purportedly measuring “animal magnetism” using some kind of ammeter, speaking a language that none of them understand. Unfortunately, the good times aren’t meant to last; a “friendly” visit from an officer of the bank reveals that they are behind on their payments due to Stroszek’s inability to read the fine print on many of the documents that he signed, and although Eva is able to secure a temporary reprieve from repossession by temporarily returning to her old line of work, she is unsatisfied with where life has taken her and ultimately runs away, hitting the road with a couple of Vancouver-bound truckers. 

When Scheitz is arrested for a poorly-thought-out attempt at vengeance on the bank for taking Stroszek’s trailer, he is truly alone, with no music to play and with no one around who even speaks his language. Stroszek seeks out the only person he knows, a German businessman who was being harassed at the start of the film by Eva’s pimps and who said that he was going to a specific place in America where there was a park where people could see freely roaming bears. This turns out to be Cherokee, NC, and it is Stroszek’s final destination as well. 

If this were a different kind of movie, one might expect that Eva would turn around one day at her waitressing job and see that her two pimps have found her and plan to take her back to Berlin, or you might think that the fact that there are four unsolved and seemingly connected murders in Railroad Flats would come back as a plot point or be relevant in some way, but nothing like that happens. There are many long montages of hard work that drive home the mindless repetition of labor, and which contribute nothing to the film narratively but serve a purpose for defining the film’s mood. It’s a movie that requires the kind of patience that a lot of audiences no longer have, as it often lingers on its tableaux in order to fully sell the scale of the feelings of loss, loneliness, and hopelessness that the characters face. As an indictment of the American Dream and all of its unfulfilled promises, it functions beautifully and has a real sense of immediacy; within a few days of arriving in Railroad Flats, Stroszek witnesses his American benefactor pull one of his own teeth with a set of pliers for a sense of relief, which he witnesses with shock made all the more isolating by his lack of understanding of English. 

The film is not without its comedic moments, but even these are meant to speak to a greater melancholy. The biggest laugh that I got came in Wisconsin, when Scheitz translates his nephew’s admonition to Stroszek to stay away from a particular fence because the strip of land on the other side is in dispute between two farmers, both of whom refuse to let his enemy plow the area, which is explicitly called “fallow.” We see these two farmers as each gets very close to the edge of the disputed territory, both of them driving their tractors with their shotguns on their hips, pointed skyward … for the moment. It’s a very funny visual, evoking the image of jousting knights with their lances at the ready, but it also speaks to the kind of violence that America is capable of. Just as the two pimps in Berlin exercised control over Eva, these two men are also primed and ready to commit violence, with potentially life-ending consequences. Stroszek also visits a kind of arcade where trained animals perform tricks; put in a quarter and watch a rabbit run into a tiny fire engine and sit there as if he is the driver, or watch a chicken peck at a tiny piano as it plays a tune, or watch another chicken dance after pushing a button in a tiny jukebox. Not so funny is how Stroszek presumably sees himself in these beasts, forced to perform over and over again for a pitiable amount of money like a trained animal; in fact, the dancing chicken is the last image that we see of the film, and it lasts for some time, as a reminder of what Stroszek became before the end. 

I have to admit that, despite all my writing about film, I’ve actually seen very little Herzog (in fact, this is only my second, after Grizzly Man), but from what I’ve absorbed about the man’s work from the pop cultural landscape, this seems like one of this works that defined his sensibility in the public eye. It’s bleak, but beautiful.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Zone of Interest (2023)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

If you’re a particular kind of self-serious cinephile, every new Jonathan Glazer movie is a Cultural Event, largely because of scarcity.  The director only has four features to his name, stretched across two decades, with half of that time passing since his previous film Under the Skin arrived in 2013.  Glazer has been “a name to watch” since his early 2000s stunners Birth & Sexy Beast (if not since his iconic 1990s music videos like “Virtual Insanity” & “Karma Police”).  Every project is so carefully planned & crafted that there’s always intense anticipation of what shape his career is going to take overall. He makes too few films for anyone to predict the big-picture trajectory of his art; there just isn’t enough data.  So, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by the announcement of his latest project, The Zone of Interest, because it doesn’t fit the shape I personally wanted for his career.  I would’ve much preferred that Glazer dove deeper into the uncanny surrealism of films like Birth & Under the Skin than where he chose to go: sinking further into ice-cold Hanekean cruelty instead.  Still, The Zone of Interest is a title of interest by default, regardless of subject or approach, and Glazer at least makes the misery meaningful & worthwhile. 

The Zone of Interest is the rare war atrocity drama that doesn’t let its audience off the hook for not being as bad as literal Nazis, but instead prompts us to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor echoes that specific moment in normalized Evil.  Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall) stars as the doting housewife of the Nazi officer who runs Auschwitz (Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel).  The couple’s idyllic home shares an external wall with the concentration camp, which soundtracks their daily domestic routines with the excruciating sounds of torture & genocide. The wife raises children, hosts parties, and tends to the garden.  The husband works tirelessly to invent more efficient ways to gas & incinerate Jews.  Both are separated from the tactile details of the violence that makes their lovely home possible, except in stark reminders when the busy work of the day is over and all that is left is the quiet of their conscience: lounging in a calm river polluted with the ashes of their victims, struggling to sleep in a house lit by the orange glow of the crematoriums, etc.  It’s a slowly escalating, dehumanizing horror that they’ve deliberately numbed themselves enough to not even notice, but it deeply sickens outsiders who briefly visit their home to smell the flowers or play with the kids.

If Glazer were a lesser artist, he would have firmly anchored his WWII drama to the tools & tones of the past, comforting his audience with the emotional distance of time.  Instead, he shoots The Zone of Interest in the style of a modern reality show, documenting the domestic busyness of his central couple on continuously running security cameras like an especially horrific episode of Big Brother.  There are even night-vision sequences that catch small acts of subversion the cameras aren’t supposed to see – good deeds that eventually go brutally punished.  Later, he interrupts the 1940s timeline with images of concentration camps’ current function as history museums, again finding a way to frame them as sites of heinous banality.  The automated-home modernization of this historical drama might initially register as a formalistic novelty, but the constant reminder that the movie is being made now with today’s technology gradually has a clear thematic purpose.  Anyone with a smartphone should be familiar with the feeling of becoming numb to grand-scale injustice & genocide as background noise while we busy ourselves with the meaningless tasks of the day.  Anyone who’s ever been lucratively employed should recognize the feeling that our jobs & lifestyles are causing active harm to people we cannot see.  We’ve all seen too many Holocaust dramas to truly feel the emotional sting of another one as if it were out first; Glazer does his best to shake us out of that numbness by making one specifically rooted in the doomscroller era.

Everything is tastefully, technically on-point here.  I was initially distracted by the automated security camera editing style, which had me looking for visible cameras in every frame, but the approach eventually proved itself thematically justified.  Mica Levi’s thunderous, minimalist score is maybe their sparsest work to date, but it’s effective in its restraint.  A24 has been well-behaved in their marketing & distribution of the film, refraining from selling boutique Nazi merch or leaning into trite FYC awards campaigning.  Glazer has again taken his time to deliver something thoughtfully crafted but not overfussed, proving himself to be one of our most patient auteurs.  I likely would not have watched The Zone of Interest if his name were not attached, since I’m generally skeptical of what yet another wartime genocide drama could possibly illuminate about history that audiences don’t already know (and have learned to ignore).  Glazer sidesteps that tedium by stating the historical facts of the narrative in plain terms – illuminating the dull, background evils of modern living instead of safely retreating to the past.  It’s not the project I would’ve greenlit if I were signing his checks, but it’s a worthy entry in his small canon of thorny, alienating features.  All I can do now is sit in the tension of what he’ll make next, likely until sometime in the 2030s.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beauty in Boredom

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

Halloween’s over, and there’s a distinct chill in the air, which means it’s time to start watching Serious Dramas for Adults again, so we can all collectively decide which movies shy far away enough from traditional genre entertainment to deserve awards statues.  I do not do my best work as an audience during the Awards Season catch-up rush, both because I’m easily distracted by the buzziest titles’ extratextual discourses and because Serious Dramas for Adults aren’t my usual thing.  I like a little reality-breaking fantasy and high-style aesthetic beauty in my motion pictures, both of which are generally frowned upon this time of year, when subtlety & realism reign supreme.  The last quarter of the theatrical release calendar isn’t boring, exactly, but it can be challenging to my over-the-top artifice sensibilities as an audience.  Which is healthy!  It’s probably for the best that I’m asked to eat my cinematic vegetables at the end of my meal every year, since I spend so much time at the buffet table stuffing my face with dessert.  Besides, there is something beautiful & cozy about the boredom of binging restrained, underplayed dramas in these colder months, especially when I’m catching up with Awards Screeners and borrowed public library DVDs under a blanket on my couch.

And so, it’s great happenstance that I caught up with two aesthetically beautiful films about boredom this week.  The Italian family drama L’immensità has been on my catch-up list for months, but I couldn’t think of a cozier time to watch Penélope Cruz model vintage 70s fashions and dance to vintage Italo pop tunes than right now.  Of course, that kind of indulgence comes with a hefty price when you’re watching Serious Dramas for Adults, which means you also have to watch Cruz suffer an abusive husband and clumsily navigate how to raise a trans teen.  She plays a protective mother who acts as a human shield between her cruel businessman husband and their cowering children, but she struggles to adapt that protective instinct to her trans son’s burgeoning status as a social outsider.  It’s the kind of cultural farce where his gender is apparent to every stranger meeting him for the first time, but the family who’s known him forever refuses to adapt to his new name & pronouns because they’re resistant to change.  Thankfully, mother and son share a bond stronger than this Conservative prejudice: the bond of boredom.  Isolated for hours by the constraints of domestic housewife duties and teenage supervision while the abusive father figure disappears to his office, they’re both bored & lonely to the point of going mad.  To stave off cabin fever in herself and her kids, Cruz offers twee escapism from the movie’s general restrained realism by parodying famous TV performances of Italian pop hits (most notably “Prisencolinensinainciusol“), complete with the kind of little-kid bedroom choreography that you can only come up with in the deepest pits of childhood boredom. 

L’immensità hits on notes of Tomboy-era Sciamma and Cruz-era Almodóvar throughout without ever quite matching the poetry of either influence.  All of the movie’s poetry & wonder belongs to Cruz, who’s dependably exquisite as always, especially whenever tasked to model vintage glamour.  Otherwise, it left me wanting for the touch of a seasoned auteur, someone who truly gets the beautiful aesthetics of Boredom as a cinematic subject.  Luckily, there’s a new film from Sofia Coppola in theaters right now to satisfy that hunger.  Priscilla is Coppola’s adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, which positions it with the exact kind of historical importance and celebrity impersonation that thrives in Awards Season publicity.  It’s also a movie about the boredom & isolation of feminine youth, which positions it with potential to resonate as one of Coppola’s career best.  Although Coppola’s Priscilla is the downers & cocktails antidote to Baz Luhrmann’s brain-poison uppers in last year’s Elvis, both directors are technically just playing the hits in their respective Graceland biopics.  Only one of them successfully recaptures the magic of their 1990s masterworks, though, and it’s the one where most of the scene-to-scene “drama” is centered on a teenage girl’s struggle to count away the hours she’s left alone at home.  Priscilla pinpoints the exact middle ground between the cloistered domestic tedium of The Virgin Suicides and the surreally empty opulence of Marie Antoinette, almost making it one of Coppola’s best by default.

As a collection of standalone images & moments, Priscilla is a work of cosmetic beauty – combining vintage 60s & 70s glamour with anachronistic pop hits that find Coppola at her most prankish (especially when a rowdy game of bumper cars is scored by Dan Deacon’s 2000s synthpop banger “The Crystal Cat”).  Again, that kind of indulgence comes with a hefty price when you’re watching Serious Dramas for Adults, which means you also have to watch Priscilla suffer an abusive husband in-between her sublime dress-up montages, an injustice punctuated by classic abuser catchphrases about how “she’s mature for her age” and how he “would never do anything that would really hurt her”.  As the story goes, she’s effectively purchased & groomed to be Elvis’s bride at age 14, a power imbalance Coppola accentuates in the 1-foot-4-inch height difference casting of her Elvis (Jacob Elordi) and her Priscila (Cailee Spaeny).  Elvis repeatedly refuses the sexual advances of his tiny teenage bride, choosing instead to dress her up like a doll to sit on his shelf, to be admired in pristine condition whenever he’s home from satisfying his more carnal urges with women he views more carnally.  The whole situation is deeply absurd and deeply alienating, which is exactly what makes it so perfect for Coppola’s eye.  Once she’s matured to a less eyebrow-raising age, Elvis marries Priscilla and allows her to work out her sexual frustration of being married to the sexiest man alive through the dirty lens of a Polaroid camera; otherwise, their sexual life together is purely procreative.  Her job is to sit still & look pretty while her husband travels doing his job of being Elvis, counting away the days of her youth on the isolated alien planet of Graceland.

Priscilla is a truly Great film, the kind of seductive, devastating stunner that makes me grateful that the Awards Season catch-up ritual lures me outside my usual genre-trash comfort zone.  In comparison, L’immensità is a much punier text, one that reminds me how much of the Serious Dramas for Adults end of the independent filmmaking spectrum is just as disposable as the genre schlock I usually seek out.  Both films reflect on the beauty & abuses of domestic boredom in a credible way, but only one achieves true cinematic transcendence in the process.  Maybe Sofia Coppola will direct Penélope Cruz in a future Awards Contender period piece about a despondent, dissatisfied housewife, combining the power of these two films into something even more substantial than either.  I look forward to watching it with a mug of tea under a warm blanket and a digital screener watermark.

-Brandon Ledet

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) is this year’s Palme d’Or winner, and it recently came to theaters in the states. For the first twenty minutes, I kept flashing back to earlier this year, when I wrote a glowing review of Tár, a movie that Brandon was much less fond of; it seemed like, at last, I had finally come face to face with my own prestige boredom piece, as I found the opening scenes didn’t initially catch my attention, but once the plot gets going, I was very invested. 

Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is a German writer living in a snowy region of southern France with her husband Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) and their son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). The film opens with Sandra giving an interview to a young woman studying her work (Camille Rutherford) before the interview is first interrupted and then abruptly concluded by Samuel’s loud music from upstairs. Daniel, blinded at a young age as the result of a street accident that damaged his optical nerve, takes a walk with his faithful guide dog Snoop, only to discover the dead body of his father at the base of the house, near a wood shed and below both a second-floor balcony and a third-floor window into a room where his father had been recently working. The police are called, and when an autopsy reveals that his head wound was sustained prior to hitting the ground, suspicion falls on Sandra. She seeks help from an old friend and lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), and when they review the details together, he tells her that, if she is indicted, it will be almost impossible to convince a jury that the death was an accident, and that their best chance at acquittal would be to argue that Samuel had committed suicide. When further evidence compounds to further insinuate Sandra’s guilt, an indictment is inevitable, and we watch this play out as both a courtroom drama and a portrait of a family being torn apart by doubt. 

One of the oddest things about this movie is that, despite being a prestige picture, in the darkness before the film begins, projected against the screen was a URL: didshedoit.com. It’s one hell of a marketing technique, and even feels a little tacky when taken in combination with the cinematic quality and legacy within which the film is situated. After my screening, I checked out the site because I was curious as to whether it was real or not or was perhaps meant to be attached to another reel for a different movie or series of trailers but no, it’s a poll in which you can vote on whether you think Sandra killed Samuel. As of both the evening on which I saw the film and at the time of writing, the poll sits at almost perfectly ⅓ guilty, ⅔ not guilty, which was reflected in the feelings of my viewing trio. I’ll tip my hand now and say that I was among the two who do not believe that Sandra is guilty (or, at the very least, I cannot be convinced of it beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt), but I also will adamantly state that her guilt or innocence is irrelevant, which is why this polling situation seems so bizarre. 

Information about Sandra and Samuel’s relationship is doled out slowly and with masterful intentionality. At first, we have no reason to believe that Sandra would be inclined to kill her husband, and as the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) paints a version of the events of the day leading up to Daniel’s discovery of his father’s body, he adds layers of intent. Could the bisexual Sandra have been upset about Daniel intentionally ruining her interview with a pretty young woman? Hasn’t she cheated on him in the past? Hadn’t they had an argument that turned physical just the previous day, which it turns out that Samuel surreptitiously recorded? But any one of these things could just as easily contribute to the narrative that Samuel took his own life—Samuel was the one who was ultimately responsible for leaving young Daniel with a babysitter, which lead to the accident that cost him his sight, and Samuel himself has never been able to get over it and has been rendered impotent by his guilt. Even though Sandra believes (or at least claims to believe) that Samuel would not have committed suicide and only accepts (or seems to accept) this potential explanation for events due to having no way to prove her stated innocence, she does admit that he attempted an overdose with aspirin earlier in the year. Daniel’s attempts to help his mother by establishing that he heard his parents speaking calmly with each other before he went on his walk cannot be corroborated when they test this possibility, which leads to his own doubts. However, the revelation of his father’s earlier attempts cause him to reframe his own understanding of the situation in a way that leads him to ask to be called to the witness stand a second time to talk about a conversation he had with his father that seems only now to make sense. 

Where the genius of the film lies is in that perpetual reframing, for the characters within it and within our own judgments as members of the audience, to whom pieces of evidence are presented over time. Where you stand on Sandra’s guilt or innocence can change very suddenly, as we learn more about her and her potential motives as well as Samuel and his own character and desires. A non-extensive, quick search of the internet tells me that the French legal system has adopted the same precept of presumed innocence as the U.S. (nominally) has, so one would assume the same or similar legal protections for Sandra as one would have in the states, but this is a trial that features an extremely antagonistic and far reaching prosecution and expert witnesses who seem more invested in securing a conviction than in honest testimony, not to mention that Sandra’s sexuality is frequently treated as if it means that she is inherently more suspicious than the “average” citizen. The prosecution offers up computer modeling of how Sandra “definitely” struck Samuel on the second floor balcony in order to leave behind three stray splashes of blood—the primary keystone for their accusations—while a physical model provided by a witness for the defense is presented only with the argument that their interpretation of the on-site evidence is equally consistent with their suicide theory. In what I hope is an exaggeration about the leniency of French court system with regards to what they will allow prosecution to put forth, the judge even allows a section of one of Sandra’s novels to be read in court, a sequence in which a first person character wishes for the death of their husband, and this is allowed to be entered into the record as evidence. 

Like most Americans, I grew up being propagandized by things like Law & Order into thinking that prosecutors are bastions of truth and justice, and unlearning that has admittedly been a long road; however, in no other piece of media have I ever felt so strongly about how ACAB includes prosecutors. Reinartz is doing stellar work here at creating a character that you have no choice but to despise, a sniveling, rat-faced little Grima Wormtongue of a man who, even when you are in one of the phases of the movie in which you’re convinced of Sandra’s innocence, you wish you could just pinch out of existence like a pimple. Also doing some extremely heavy lifting is Machado-Graner, who with this film alone deserves to be canonized as one of those exceedingly rare child actors whose presence improves a film rather than diminishing it. His sense of loss, first of his father and then over and over again with his mother in increasing amounts, is palpable, and that the film’s climax hangs upon his shoulders is a big gamble, but it not only works, it soars. As he gives his speech, in which he recounts a conversation with Samuel that they had months before—while returning from the vet when Daniel’s dog got sick, which unbeknownst to the boy was the result of the dog licking up his father’s suicide attempt-induced vomit—that he now believes (or is pretending to believe, or even simply willing to believe) was his father communicating with him honestly but subtly about his ideation and the need to be ready for when “he” goes, leaving it ambiguous as to whether “he” is Snoop or Samuel. 

I believed that the film would end there, and a part of me wanted it to. I know that the majority of general audiences now are very hung up on plot and resolution, and there would have been outcry if the film left two ambiguities to the viewer’s imagination; that is, whether Sandra was guilty or not and whether she would be convicted or acquitted. I won’t spoil the latter and I’ve already made my decision about the former, but I don’t want to make my case for it since I would rather allow those reading this who have not already seen it the opportunity to know only what I thought while being unburdened with why. I would have felt the film complete even without knowledge of the ruling, however, and there’s a part of me that wishes that version of the film existed, as it would leave even more topics open for discussion with others after the film was over, but I am also content with what we have. For instance, it’s fascinating that Daniel’s final testimony plays out on screen with him and his father as a flashback, as several previous scenes had, but we never hear his father’s voice, only him as he recounts Samuel’s words. What are we to make of that? In an earlier scene, when the court hears the recording of the argument between Samuel and Sandra on the day before his death, the playback begins and then we are transported into that moment to watch the argument play out, up to the point where violence is about to begin, at which point we are back in the courtroom hearing the recording. From there, we only have Sandra’s word as to what the sounds we hear are (although there is physical evidence to back up her claim that one of the sounds was Samuel punching the wall hard enough to leave a hole). When discussing the physical evidence and the, ahem, anatomy of the fall, the prosecutor’s witness’s version of events includes a flash-brief shot of Sandra striking Samuel just as he describes; no symmetrical shot appears during the defense’s expert witness’s testimony. This distinction between what we as audience members are presented with as “video” “evidence” and that which we only hear described is an integral part of the questions that the movie will leave you with, as the film has a distinctively documentarian feel (which it draws attention to near the end of the second act, as the camera “follows” the presiding judge offscreen and then returns to focus on the center of the dais, as if the camera operator had been taken aback by unexpected movement and attempted to keep it in frame). 

I’m usually hot or cold on prestige dramas like this, and Anatomy of a Fall is one that definitively falls into the former category. We don’t get many courtroom dramas on the big screen anymore, as the small screen world of copaganda has eaten up most of the general public’s allotment of attention for that genre, but this is one that’s well worth the time and the praise that it’s been receiving. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

On a recent vacation in the Twin Cities, I spent an afternoon at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which is currently exhibiting “150 photographs of, by, and for Indigenous people” in a photography collection titled “In Our Hands”.  It was during that same vacation when I watched Martin Scorsese’s Indigenous genocide drama Killers of the Flower Moon, which is also a series of photographs grappling with the medium’s representation & othering of Indigenous peoples.  Because I’m a movie obsessive, the photographs featured in “In Our Hands” that spoke to me loudest were the ones about misrepresentations of “American Indians” in American pop media.  Cara Romero’s 2017 photograph “TV Indians” pairs living Indigenous figures with vintage images of fictional Indigenous stereotypes, displayed on cathode-ray televisions in the colonized & decimated landscape of New Mexico.  Sarah Sense’s 2018 mixed-media piece “Custer and the Cowgirl with Her Gun” combines images of vintage Indigenous stereotypes in media with personal photographs & historical writing from her Chitimacha & Choctaw homeland through a traditional basket weaving technique that transforms & reclaims the medium of photography for a culture it has been historically weaponized against.  Killers of the Flower Moon also addresses the fraught history of Indigenous representation in American media, to the point where its theatrical exhibition opens with Scorsese explaining his “authentic” behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Osage communities the story depicts. The film also concludes with a second onscreen appearance from the director effectively apologizing for his participation in the tradition of speaking for & about Indigenous people from a white American perspective.

To his credit, Scorsese does limit the amount of time & space he spends speaking for the Osage tribe, smartly focusing instead on the people he’s built an entire artistic career around understanding: white thugs.  Killers of the Flower Moon is a typical Scorsese crime picture in that it details the step-by-step villainy of greedy American brutes who commit heinous, organized acts of violence in order to squeeze a few petty dollars out of their neighbors.  He acknowledges this continuation of his pet themes by casting his two go-to muses in central roles: Leonardo DiCaprio as a slack-jawed goon and Robert De Niro as the criminal mastermind who puppeteers him.  The dastardly duo conspires to become friends, family, heirs, and murderers to the Osage people, who have stumbled upon immense wealth when their government-assigned strip of land proves to be a viable source of crude oil.  DiCaprio’s assigned mark is a lonely but stoic young woman played by Lily Gladstone, whom he seduces, marries, creates children with, and then slowly poisons while murdering members of her family under the direction of De Niro’s whims & schemes.  Gladstone’s performance is formidable within that central trio, and she stands to benefit the most from this collaboration with Old Uncle Marty.  Still, it’s the slimy, bottomless cruelty of De Niro & DiCaprio’s characters that drives most of the scene-to-scene drama, so that Scorsese is telling his own people’s story more than he is speaking for the Osage.  Watching the movie in conjunction with visiting the M.I.A.’s “In Our Hands” exhibit raises questions of why these same film production resources can’t be put in the hands of Indigenous artists as well, but that question does little to unravel the specific story Scorsese chose to tell here.

Where the question of authenticity & representation really comes into play is in the film’s coda, delivered after De Niro & DiCaprio’s thugs have already been arrested for their crimes by the Baby’s First Steps version of the FBI.  Where lesser Awards Season historical dramas will fill the audience in on how their characters’ lives resolved via onscreen text before the end credits, Scorsese delivers that information via dramatic radio play — complete with the outdat foley sound effects and outdated racist stereotypes that would’ve been contemporary in that pre-cinematic medium.  The director then shambles onscreen himself as a radio announcer to read Gladstone’s character’s real-life obituary to the audience with humble solemnity.  This is a jarring stylistic swing for a film that often finds Scorsese working in Boardwalk Empire mode more than Goodfellas mode (more dramatic than cinematic), but it’s at least one that seeks artistic purpose beyond reciting this history to a wide audience who needs to hear it.  Here we have a quintessentially American story told by a quintessential American storyteller, and yet there’s no way for Scorsese to recite that history without in some way participating in its ongoing genocidal erasure of Indigenous voices.  The opening doorway image to the “In Our Hands” exhibit is a portrait of an Osage woman taken by photographer Ryan Redcorn, purposefully representing his subject in a proud, dignified pose.  In Scorsese’s picture, Osage women are sickly victims of white American greed, because that’s true to white American history.  It’s worth pushing for a better world where both of those images are offered equally accessible platforms, and this film’s coda feels like an uneasy acknowledgement of the current imbalance.  Still, this is a story worth reciting, and there are certainly less noble things Scorsese could be doing with $treaming $ervice money than turbocharging Lily Gladstone’s career.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future) is a beautiful, entrancing film, the first feature from writer-director Francisca Alegria. Although most reviews of the film that I have seen draw attention to the film’s environmental themes and magical-realist atmosphere, I’ve seen very little discussion about the film’s presentation of family. One of the film’s inciting incidents is the dumping of industrial waste from a paper factory into the Cruces River, but what stands out the most to me is the way that the movie focuses on a different kind of toxic waste, and the way that it can pollute the very thing that gives us life. 

Magdalena (Mía Maestro) is a doctor living in a cold urban home, having put as much distance between herself and her rural upbringing as possible. When she receives a call from her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) telling her that their dairy farmer father Enrique (Alfredo Castro) has suffered from a heart attack, she returns home with her two daughters, including teenaged Tomás (Enzo Ferrada), whose gender identity she does not respect. Upon arriving and performing her own medical inspection of her father, she is told that he did not have a standard heart attack, but that it was a sudden stress-induced health issue. Enrique, for his part, tells his children that he passed out after seeing their long-dead mother Cecilia (Leonor Varela) outside of a cell phone store. Magdalena does not believe him, of course, since she was the one who watched her mother commit suicide by tying herself to her motorcycle and driving into the river when she was a mere seven years old, but he’s absolutely correct; we in the audience saw Cecilia climb out of that same river, accompanied by a mournful him that seems to come from the dead fish surrounding her, in the film’s opening moments. But what brought her back, and why?

As a character study, this is a piece about a woman who has long embodied the worst aspects of her father but learns to represent the best parts of her mother. As with many texts containing magical realism, much is left up to the interpretation, but we first see her being harsh and cold with the people closest to her, first telling Tomás that, as long as she lives in Magdalena’s house, she is her “son.” Her brother’s feelings about her are clear from their first onscreen interaction; although Bernardo lovingly embraces his nieces, when Magdalena moves in to hug him, he waves her off, citing that he has been working and is too filthy to be touched. When they arrive at the farm, Magdalena sends Bernardo off to take care of the dairy “for once” while she attends to their father. In comparison to the lush verdancy of the countryside, her home in the city is sterile, and when nature intrudes (in the form of a spider in her bathroom window), she doesn’t attempt to coax it outside and close the window, but instead runs off for a can of insecticide, which she sprays into the air futilely when she returns to find that the spider is nowhere to be seen. 

All of these are elements that tie Magdalena to Enrique, who is likewise queerphobic, dismissive of his child, and sees the natural world as something that exists only to benefit human beings, diametrically opposed by civilization. Enrique also chides Bernardo for failing to take care of the dairy, even blaming him when their cows die despite their death being the direct result of Enrique’s refusal to listen to his son; his reaction to Bernardo’s insistence that they dig a new well for the cows shows that this is a recurring argument, but it’s that very lack of forethought that leads to the herd drinking from the poisoned river when they are overcome with thirst, essentially damning the dairy farm to close. When the tearful Bernardo brings this to his father’s attention, the older man calls his son a homophobic slur and degrades him. Magdalena has spent her life seeing things through her father’s myopic, cruel vision of the world, and her own family has suffered from his polluting influence as a result. That this traces itself back to her childhood is no surprise. Like her father, she has long seen her mother’s suicide as a sign of weakness due to not wanting to be a mother, as evidenced by all the times in her memory that her mother was absent while still alive. In truth, those absences were the fault of her father, who had Cecilia institutionalized multiple times because he could not control her. Luckily for her, learning this is epiphanic, and even if she is limited in her ability to heal the world, it’s not too late to heal her relationship with Tomás.

If you were wondering if there is an actual singing cow in this movie, then I regret to inform you that there is not … there are several. At the start of the film, what appears to be non-diegetic music plays as the shores of the Cruces give up hundreds of dead fish, with these images soundtracked by a mournful elegy about dying. After there are news reports that the toxic waste in the water has killed not only the fish but also the various water grasses and insects that sustain other animals in the ecosystem, which leave the area in search of other food resources. Finally, the cows drink the waters of the river and themselves succumb to the poison, but before they pass, they join their voices in a chorus, grieving for the calves that were taken from them so that they would continuously produce milk for the farm, and rejoicing that the pain that came from that separation, which they consider to be worse than death, will end soon. This has the potential to be unintentionally funny, especially in the odd occasional moment in which one of the cow “actors” is chewing cud almost in time to the song like something out of Mister Ed, but the sincerity of the moment manages to make it work despite the potential to be undermined. 

That separation between mother and child stands as a metaphor not just for the relationship between Magdalena and the long-dead mother whom she unconsciously resents, but also between Magdalena and her own elder daughter. When we first meet Tomás, she is in her bedroom, showing her beau an online newspaper clipping about Cecilia’s death, asking if the boy sees the resemblance between Tomás and her grandmother. Her self-actualization is blocked not only by her mother’s bigotry but also her disconnection from her roots, and her hunger for a connection drives her to seek out her resurrected grandmother and the two bond. The revived Cecilia is mute throughout the film, but there’s a magic to the way that these two women who share a familial bond but who have never met are able to form a connection without the need for words. A love that transcends speech reappears again at the end, when Tomás and her mother reunite, and even without words, it’s clear that the two of them have gained a better understanding of each other, in unvoiced acceptance. 

This is certainly one of the most moving films I’ve seen this year, as well as one of the most lyrical, beautifully composed, and haunting. It sets its mood and never alters course, hypnotic in its commitment to its themes. It should not be missed. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Weapons of Mass Distraction

/ swampflix / 14 Comments

Like most other bored, overheated Americans, I spent the third Friday of July hiding from the sun in my neighborhood movie theater, watching an all-day double feature.  I didn’t directly participate in the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, though, partly due to scheduling inconvenience and partly out of general bafflement with the incongruous pairing.  As a longtime movie obsessive, it was wonderful to see more casual audiences out in full force, dressed up to participate in a double feature program; or it was at least a more endearing moviegoing meme than its recent “Gentleminions” predecessor.  I still like to program my double features with a little more consideration to tone & theme, though, and I can’t imagine that either Nolan’s or Gerwig’s latest were served well by the pairing – which was essentially a joke about how ill-suited they were for back-to-back binging in the first place.  However, I’m not immune to pop culture FOMO, which is how I wound up watching Oppenheimer in the first place.  Nothing about the film’s subject, genre, or marketing screamed out to me as essential viewing, other than the assumption that it was going to be a frequent subject of movie nerd discourse until at least next year’s Oscars ceremony.  So, I dragged my old, tired body to the theater at 10am on a weekday to sit down with Christopher Nolan’s three-hour rumination on the placid evils of nuclear war, and then paired it with a movie I suspected I would like just to sweeten the deal – the ludicrously titled Mission: Impossible 7, Part 1 – Dead Reckoning.  It was essentially the same dessert-after-dinner double feature approach most participating audiences took with Barbenheimer (which, considering that sequence, likely should’ve just been called “Oppie”), except applied to two feature films on a single subject: the abstract weaponry of modern war.

As you surely already know, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the titular nuclear physicist, credited for leading the development of the atom bomb at the end of WWII.  His story is told in two conflicting, alternating perspectives: his own version of events in full color (as told to a military security-clearance review board) and a black-and-white version recounted by a professional rival (as told years later in a Congressional hearing).  It’s an abrasively dry approach to such an explosive, emotional subject, even if Nolan does everything possible to win over Dad Movie heretics like me in the story’s framing & editing – breaking up the pedestrian men-talking-in-rooms rhythms of an Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin screenplay with his own flashier, in-house Nolanisms.  Oppenheimer strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a “Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!” rhythm.  After so many years of tinkering with the cold, technical machinery of cinema, Nolan at least seems willing to allow a new sense of looseness & abstraction into the picture to disrupt his usual visual clockwork (starting most clearly in Tenet).  Young Oppenheimer’s visit to an art museum as a student suggests that this new, abstracted style is inspired by the Cubist art movement of the setting’s era, but the editing feels purely Malickian to me, especially when covering the scientist’s early years.  My favorite moments were his visions of cosmos—micro and macro—while puzzling through the paradoxes of nuclear science, as well as his wife’s intrusive visions of his sexual affair while defending himself to a military panel.  These are still small, momentary distractions from the real business at hand: illustrating the biggest moral fuck-up of human history in all its daily office-work drudgery.  Most of the movie is outright boring in its “What have we done?” contemplations of bureaucratic weaponry-development evil, no matter how much timeline jumping it does in its character-actor table reads of real-life historical documents.

In all honesty, the most I got out of Oppenheimer was an appreciation for it table-setting the mood for the much more entertaining Mission: Impossible 7.  To paraphrase Logan Roy, I am not a serious person.  The great tragedy of Nolan’s piece is watching a Jewish, Leftist man’s attempts to stop his people’s genocide get exploited by the American military’s bottomless hunger for bigger, deadlier bombs – ultimately resulting in a new, inconceivable weapon that will likely lead to the end of humanity’s life on planet Earth (if other forms of industrial pollution don’t kill us first).  Oppenheimer doesn’t realize until it’s too late that his team’s invention did not end WWII; it instead created a new, infinite war built on the looming international threat of mutual self-destruction.  The immediate consequences of the atom bomb were the devastation of two Japanese cities, leaving figurative blood on the haunted man’s hands, which he attempts to clean in the final hour of runtime by ineffectively maneuvering for world peace within the system he helped arm.  The long-term consequences are much more difficult to define, leaving a lingering atmospheric menace on the world outside the theater after the credits roll.  Instead of sweetening that menace with the pink-frosted confectionary of Barbie, I followed up Oppenheimer with a much vapider novelty: the latest Tom Cruise vanity project.  Speaking of history’s greatest monsters, I was also feeling a little uneasy about watching the latest Tom Cruise stunt fest (especially after suffering through last year’s insipid Top Gun rebootquel), but credit where it’s due: Dead Reckoning was a great time at the movies.  Unlike Oppenheimer, M:I 7 is built of full, robust scenes and complete exchanges of dialogue instead of the de-constructed Malickian snippets of a three-hour trailer.  It’s a three-hour frivolity in its own right, but it’s an intensely entertaining one, and it immediately restored my faith that I can still appreciate mainstream, big-budget cinema right after Nolan shook it.  Also, there was something perverse about it doing so by toying around on the exact Cold War playground Oppenheimer mistakenly created.

If there’s a modern equivalent to the abstract, unfathomable power of the atom bomb (besides, you know, the still-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in many countries’ arsenals), it’s likely in the arena of digital espionage and the development of A.I. technology.  The seventh Mission: Impossible film runs with the zeitgeisty relevance of killer-A.I. weaponry at full speed, creating an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everything-everywhere A.I. villain that looks like a vintage iTunes visualizer.  It’s about as well defined as the young Oppenheimer’s intrusive visions of nuclear particles, but neither Cruise nor his in-house workman director Christopher McQuarrie are especially interested in figuring out the scientific logic behind it.  Dead Reckoning‘s A.I. villain—referred to simply (and frequently) as The Entity—is mostly just an excuse for the creepy millionaire auteur behind it to stage a series of increasingly outlandish stunts.  By some miracle, the new Mission: Impossible nearly matches the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-A.I. combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it the most entertaining American action blockbuster of the year by default.  Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie, ending on a literal cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until a three-hour Part 2 conclusion of the miniseries reaches theaters in a couple years.  Since that double feature isn’t currently screening in its entirety, I had to settle for pairing it with Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which at least helped give its over-the-top A.I. espionage theatrics a sense of real-world consequence.  The only recognizable threat behind The Entity’s abstract swirl of LED lights is that it’s smart enough to fool & manipulate nuclear-capable governments.  It could bring the world to an end with the weaponry we’ve already created ourselves, and it wouldn’t be too surprising if Dead Reckoning, Part 2 includes a gag where Cruise diffuses an actual, active nuclear warhead while riding it in the sky like Slim Pickens before him.

My disparate reactions to Oppenheimer and Dead Reckoning likely have more to do with personal taste & disposition than the movies’ objective qualities.  Whereas self-serious lines of dialogue like “How can this man, who saw so much, be so blind?” and “Is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what’s happening here?” had me rolling my eyes at Oppenheimer, I was delighted by Mission: Impossible’s equally phony line reading of “Ethan, you are playing 4D chess with an algorithm,” delivered by Ving Rhames with the same unearned gravitas.  Maybe it’s because I don’t expect much out of the big-budget end of mainstream filmmaking except for its value as in-the-moment entertainment.  I don’t think Oppenheimer‘s internal wrestling with its protagonist’s guilt over inventing The Bomb or our government’s mistreatment of his professional reputation in The McCarthy Era amounts to all that much, except maybe as a reminder that the threat of Nuclear Apocalypse is an ongoing Important Issue.  It obviously can’t solve that issue in any meaningful way, though, unless you put a lot of personal meaning into Hollywood’s ability to convert Important Issues into Awards Statues.  It’s a movie, not a systemic political policy.  I personally see more immediate value in Mission: Impossible‘s ability to delight & distract (both from the real-world horrors of nuclear war and, more maliciously, the real-world horrors of its star), since that’s using the tools of mainstream filmmaking for what they’re actually apt to accomplish.  Oppenheimer is a three-hour montage of Important Men played by “That guy!” character actors exchanging tight smirks & knowing glances in alternating boardroom readings of historical testimony.  Dead Reckoning, Part 1 is a three-hour Evil Knievel stuntman roadshow punctuated by abstract info-dumps about the immense, unfathomable power of A.I. technology.  The closest Nolan comes to matching Cruise in this head-to-head battle in terms of pure entertainment value is the visual gag of a doddering Albert Einstein repeatedly dropping his hat. 

-Brandon Ledet