julianne nicholson

Quick Takes: Summertime Drama

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It’s been a strangely quiet summer for theatrical moviegoing so far, thanks largely to last year’s Hollywood labor strikes.  All of the usual corporate slop that clogs up American movie marquees has been arriving in a slow trickle instead of a constant flood, which has many box office pundits panicking about the collapse of theatrical exhibition as a viable industry.  I understand that theaters need weekly hits to sell enough popcorn to keep the projectors running, but I have to admit I’ve mostly been enjoying the lull.  This year’s short supply of substantial superhero sequels & IP extenders has left a lot of room for smaller, gentler films to breathe in local cinemas – from digital restorations of already venerated classics like Le Samouraï  & It’s Such a Beautiful Day to future classics in D.I.Y. outsider art like Hundreds of Beavers & The People’s Joker.  It’s actually been a great summer for movies so far if all you care about is easy access to high-quality cinema, which pretty much fully accounts for my selfish POV.

Last year, when I wrote about the state of summertime moviegoing in early June, I reported that I had retreated from theaters to watch smaller, quieter movies than what they were offering at home instead.  This year, I don’t have to stream those quiet dramas from my couch; they’re actually playing in New Orleans cinemas right now.  Theaters may be struggling, but attentive cinephiles are thriving.  So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget dramas currently playing across the city (among other titles I haven’t had time to catch up with yet, like The Bikeriders, Tuesday, and I Used to Be Funny).

Ghostlight

The most consistent, predictable supplier of the small-scale indie drama is, of course, The Sundance Film Festival, which typically opens the year with a handful of buzzy, awardsy titles that inevitably get drowned out by louder, flashier titles from later festivals like Cannes.  Somehow, Ghostlight plays directly into the tropes & expectations of a typical Sundance selection but earns sharp laughs and emotional pangs though that familiar template.  A family drama about a macho, emotionally closed-off construction worker who gets in touch with his feelings by signing up to play Romeo Montague in a community-theatre Shakespeare production, it’s got the general shape of a standard post-Little Miss Sunshine festival breakout.  However, it ends up being an inversion of hokey indie drama tropes instead of playing them straight.  There are plenty dramas that are shot like documentaries, and there are plenty documentaries that are shot like dramas; Ghostlight is a drama shot like a documentary that’s shot like a drama (a turdocen, if you will).  There are also plenty dramas wherein an actor’s real life starts to mirror a role they’re playing in their art, but Ghostlight is about an already famous play that starts to mirror the actor’s life instead, taking the teen-suicide themes of Romeo & Juliet more seriously than most modern adaptations and interpretations. It’s shockingly successful in that inversion too. If nothing else, it made me cry earlier & more often than any other new release I’ve seen so far this year.

I don’t often cry when something sad happens in a movie, like when the farm burns down in Minari.  I tend to cry at mawkish acts of kindness, like when Mrs. Harris is gifted the dress she desperately wanted after her trip to Paris.  In Ghostlight, all of the saddest events in our tough-exterior construction worker’s life happen before the audience meets the big softie.  All we really know about him at first is that he’s explosively angry when pressed to talk about his feelings, and that he’s currently rehearsing for two auditions: one for a legal deposition in a civil lawsuit and one for his first theatrical role as Romeo.  The audience is able to deduce the details of the lawsuit long before our grieving hero has the strength to voice them, based on his discomfort with the plot of the Shakespearean tragedy he was roped into performing.  The biggest tearjerking moments are all in the way his small social circle gently pushes him to heal without scaring him off: Dolly de Leon as a failed pro actor who takes him in like a wounded puppy, Katherine Mallen Kupferer as his theatre-nerd daughter who finally has a mechanism for bonding with her walled-off father, Tara Mallen as his put-upon wife who supports his surprising new hobby even though it threatens the couple’s domestic intimacy.  It’s a lovely, loving communal dynamic that only gets more emotionally effective once you learn that the central family unit is played by a real-life family of Chicago-area actors, led by Keith Kupferer as the hard-hatted thespian.  So much of Ghostlight‘s premise and presentation sounds phony in the abstract, but in practice there’s a raw, healing truth to it that’s cathartic to anyone willing to be vulnerable.

Janet Planet

Not everyone wants to spend the hot summer months having a public ugly-cry about small acts of kindness.  Maybe you just want to space out in your neighborhood theater’s AC and observe small acts of being.  The 1990s period piece Janet Planet is a warmly familiar coming-of-age story slowwwed down to the tempo of summer bugs ambiently chirping in the woods.  It’s like a less traumatic Aftersun, chronicling the summer months spent by a young girl named Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) quietly observing her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson).  The film’s chapter breaks are named after various temporary boarders & lovers who drift through the small family’s home, mostly without incident.  Lacy is a bookworm introvert who observes the adult behavior around her with searing intensity, which redirects the dramatic scrutiny of the movie towards Janet’s relationships.  Occasionally, she’ll match her mother’s impulsive, depressed disposition with unprompted one-liners like “Do you know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.”  Mostly, though, this is a drama of recognition, dragging the audience back to childhood experiences of being lonely, bored, and disregarded – filling your empty schedule with personal rituals, like compulsively plastering your loose hairs on the shower wall.  Lacy is realistically awkward, selfish, and nosy for a child her age.  We’ve all been there, but not all of us were so still and so quiet about it.

I would have never guessed that Janet Planet is the debut film of a well-known playwright (Annie Baker), given the general sparseness of its spoken dialogue.  There’s a detailed specificity to Lacy’s environment at the edge of 1990s Massachusetts hippie communes that feels like the work of a novelist, especially by the time she’s attending midsummer puppet festivals and watching her mother run an at-home acupuncture clinic (the titular Janet Planet).  At the same time, it belongs to a broad lineage of observational coming-of-age stories broadcasting the inner lives of young girls: Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, My Girl, Mermaids, Now & Then, Eighth Grade, Peppermint Soda, the aforementioned Aftersun, etc.  Its major distinction within that canon is in its slow-cinema distancing, in which a fixed camera silently observes the figures shrinking in its frame as they wander at the edges of American wilderness, their thoughts drowned out by the roaring static of birds & bugs.  I suppose it’s also distinct in that it’s the only film in this canon with a Laurie Anderson needle drop, which alone says a lot about the idiosyncrasies of Lacy & Janet’s particular, peculiar home environment.

Evil Does Not Exist

Falling further down the slow-cinema rabbit hole, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest drama Evil Does Not Exist is even more quietly observant of its characters’ bodies shrinking against the enormity of nature, often staring into a fixed place in the wooded distance for minutes on end.  Unlike Janet Planet, though, it’s set in the snowy mountains of a small village outside Tokyo, which is a visually appealing reprieve from the Climate Change heat waves outside the cinema walls.  That village will not be small for long.  After distantly observing the daily lives & labor of the rural locals, we’re led to a fluorescent-lit townhall meeting wherein greedy real estate developers announce a plan to establish a large-scale “glamping” site for tourists that will transform the village forever, despite protests.  The rest of the film is a tense battle of wills between skeptical locals who want to maintain an authentic relationship with their environment (represented by Hitoshi Okima) and big-city phonies who want to commodify that authenticity as an amusement-park experience (represented by Tyuji Kosaka).  This philosophical clash inevitably culminates in a shocking act of violence in the final seconds, but most of the “evil” depicted in the film is quietly bureaucratic and told through the grimaces of the locals being steamrolled for short-term profits.

I had an unexpectedly conflicted reaction to Evil Does Not Exist, especially to its cheap digi-video image quality.  Its amateur-grade digital video felt appropriately soulless when mocking the sinister mundanity of City Brain but felt flat & ugly when gazing at the idyllic mundanity of Country Life.  Dramatically, it packs neither the emotional wallop of Ghostlight nor the melancholic beauty of Janet Planet, even if its political & philosophical themes are more sharply defined.  It ended up being a mixed bag for me, which was a surprise after being enthusiastic about the other Hamaguchis I’ve seen (Drive My Car and Asako I & II).  Still, its quiet mood and overly patient pacing make for excellent summertime counterprogramming just as much as Ghostlight or Janet Planet.  These are the kinds of movies that theaters usually only have space for in the last-minute awards campaigns of winter, so excuse me if I’m a little perversely grateful for mainstream Hollywood’s current supply-chain struggles.

-Brandon Ledet

Dream Scenario (2023)

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There’s something distinctly Kaufman-esque about Dream Scenario, and it’s not just that the film stars Adaptation performer Nicolas Cage. All of Charlie Kaufman’s films are ambitious narratives that revolve around a man who is in some way, be it major or minor, removed from the reality of the people around him, and who ends up caught up in a widespread event that is (usually) not of their own making or volition. In Adaptation, meek screenwriter Charlie ends up caught in a criminal enterprise as a result of simply trying to adapt a non-fiction book into a workable film adaptation; in Anomalisa, Michael Stone’s apparent mental disorder causes him to see all faces as identical, and he gets swept up in a nightmare scenario of bureaucratic intrigue; in Synecdoche, New York, Caden Cotard’s creation of a nesting doll of reality takes on a life of its own and he is swept away inside of it. All of his works are also about a person being forced into a situation that is, to their mind, completely unfair, and their myopic reactions to it exacerbate the situation. It seems unfair to Joel in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that Clementine has intentionally lost her memories of him, so he pursues the same avenue to have her removed from his thoughts; it seems unfair to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Synecdoche that his wife has left him and taken their daughter with her, and his imaginings of the worst possible outcomes of that situation contribute to his declining health; the unfairness of a life of unfulfilled dreams causes the janitor character in I’m Thinking of Ending Things to fantasize a completely different life, which has its own horrors. 

Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is, like many of the Kaufman protagonists listed above, a man with a fairly decent life, including a tenured position at a small college. He and his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) have a pleasant enough life, living in her spacious childhood home with their teen daughters, elder typical teen Hannah (Jessica Clement) and younger Sophie (Lily Bird). Paul isn’t a bad person, but he is hapless and overly invested in other people’s perception of him. The film opens in Sophie’s dream, where objects begin falling from the sky, and although she calls out to the Paul in her dream for help, he doesn’t react; when she tells her parents about the dream the next morning, Paul gets hung up on the fact that the dreamed version of himself was apathetic to his daughter’s concerns and worries about what his daughter thinks of him. On campus, he’s too focused on his students talking about him behind his back. He has the respect of his school’s administrator (Tim Meadows), but he yearns for acknowledgement from his former academic colleague Richard (Dylan Baker), who is known for hosting fabulous dinner parties for other people he considers elite. This seems terribly unfair to him, even though there are actions he could take to better himself. Instead of humiliating himself by pleading for a co-author credit from a different former colleague on a subject he claims to have conceived of first, he could stop talking about “thinking about writing a book” and actually do some of that research and writing himself. 

Despite his relative anonymity, Paul finds himself a sudden subject of internet virality. After running into an old girlfriend (Marnie McPhail) after a play, she tells him that she has been dreaming about him and asks if she can blog about the experience. In doing so, she links to his Facebook page, which results in a huge influx of notifications from hundreds, then thousands of others, all who have seen Paul in their dreams; Paul is flustered that he seems to be a passive observer in all of these scenarios. Suddenly flush with positive attention, Paul attempts to leverage this into a book deal, and signs up with a P.R. firm headed by the neurotic Trent (Michael Cera) and Mary (Kate Berlant), who swings back and forth between sycophantic and self-absorbed. In so doing, he meets assistant Molly (Dylan Gelula), who leads him to realize that doing nothing in people’s dreams is actually the best case scenario here. The general public turns on him for reasons I won’t spoil, and all of it is out of his hands. 

I couldn’t have imagined that I would reference the 2007 novel Mon Cœur à l’étroit (My Heart Hemmed In) by Marie NDiaye in a single review this year, let alone two. In writing about Beau is Afraid, I talked about how the protagonist of the novel awoke one morning to learn that all of her neighbors despised her, or perhaps that they suddenly all despise her at once, after years of apparent tolerance. Like her, Paul is a teacher here, and although the reason for the sudden change of heart among her peers results in not just the loss of academic prestige, but its conversion into outright hostility. Although the reason that the narrator of Hemmed is ostracized is less explicit than in Scenario, the reasons are nevertheless just as ethereal, and the horror comes from the way that something over which one has no control can completely destroy their life. Hemmed never mines that field for comedy like Scenario does, but they exist in the same rhetorical space nonetheless, wherein a fairly well-liked educator becomes a pariah because of circumstances in which they have no say. 

There’s a deft handling of the metaphor of fame in Dream Scenario that I really enjoyed. Like many people who achieve a modicum of viral fame, he didn’t do anything to make himself the center of attention, at least initially. His sudden appearance in people’s dreams has no explanation and isn’t the result of anything that he has done. Although he initially appears in the dreams of people who know him like his daughter and students, he only becomes known to the public because of his ex-girlfriend’s blog post, when strangers become aware that the man that they are seeing in their dreams is a real person. Like all internet fame, however, it’s fleeting, and his attempts to leverage it into achieving his actual desires are stunted when his dream persona moves from being an apathetic bystander in their dreams to an active participant and, eventually, a source of terror, all of it once again having nothing to do with anything that Paul himself has done. Sure, he’s hapless and selfish, but no more so than the average person, and it’s hard to blame him for wanting to use this unwanted stardom to get something that he actually wants. Although he is pathetic, letting his ego get the best of him, there’s nothing malicious about anything that he does, which makes his sudden turn into Twitter’s villain more pitiable; his poorly received, self-serving online apology makes things worse (as they often do, just look at Colleen Ballinger), but unlike a lot of the internet celebs whose attempted apologies are dissected to hell and back for their insincerity, Paul actually didn’t do anything to deserve his backlash. 

The film ends on an ambiguous and bittersweet note, which reflects the film’s slow turn from being a comedy about an upper middle class nobody to a horror story about being a public figure with no control over his perception. There are still comedic moments as the final minutes approach, including a scene wherein Cage goes full-camp in a photoshoot with a bladed gauntlet that is similar to but legally distinct from Freddy Krueger’s, as well as a visual call back to an earlier discussion of Paul’s Halloween costume from a few years prior, but it ends without setting everything in Paul’s reality back to where it was before, ultimately making it the kind of somber movie that so often plays so well during this time of year. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Monos (2019)

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There’s a mystery at the core of Monos that has nothing to do with plot reveals or concealed identities among its characters. The mystery is mostly a matter of getting your bearings. What’s clear is that we’re spending a couple tense hours in the Amazon rainforest with a teenage militia as they struggle to maintain control over a political hostage and a sustenance-providing milk cow. The details surrounding that circumstance are continually disorienting as the whos, whys, and whens of the premise are kept deliberately vague. The temporal setting could range from thirty years in the past to thirty years into the apocalyptic future, limited only by the teen soldiers’ codenames being inspired by 80s pop culture references like Rambo & Smurf. The political ideology of The Organization that commands this baby-faced militia is never vocalized, hinted at only by the fact that the mostly POC youth are holding an adult white woman (the consistently wonderful Julianne Nicholson) hostage at gunpoint. The film doesn’t waste any time establishing the rules of the world that surround this violent, jungle-set microcosm. Instead, it chooses to convey only the unrelenting tension & brutality that defines the daily life of this isolated tentacle of a much larger, undefined political resistance. It’s maddening – purposefully so.

The reason Monos gets away with this stubborn refusal to establish a solid contextual foundation for its audience is that the sights, sounds, and performances that flood the screen are consistently, impressively intense. We’re estranged in a remote, lush jungle Where The Wild Things Go Too Far. The mountainside cliffs open to cloud formations the size of metropolises; the river rapids seemingly threaten to crush the (mostly unknown) teenage actors before our eyes. As the kids devolve from disciplined soldiers to wild animals without the watchful eye of an authority figure, they become a punishing force of Nature themselves. What starts as a jubilant celebration of freedom & autonomy—with recreational mushroom trips, fireside cunnilingus, and history’s most irresponsible gunplay—inevitably erupts into cruel, purposeless violence. They begin the film waging war on an outside, unseen enemy but eventually only wage war among themselves, almost as if they were rowdy children with guns. This constant, unrelenting mayhem is chillingly scored by Mica Levi in what very well may be her finest work to date (in film at least; I’m still a huge fan of her pop album Jewellery). The downward trajectory of Monos is from barely contained chaos to total, irrevocable chaos, which is more of a recognizable distinction than you might expect.

A lot of critical coverage of this film has understandably compared it to works like Apocalypse Now & Lord of the Flies, but to me it felt more like Nocturama of the Jungle. The clinically precise way these violently horny, prankish children (whose sexuality is just as fluid as their morals) are framed makes for a wonderfully rewarding contrast between form & content. Like in Nocturama, their innocent naivete and stylish teenage cool are somehow never lost even when they’re at their most despicably violent, even when we’re unclear what all this mayhem is meant to accomplish. Ultimately, though, I think I preferred the structure of Nocturama much better to Monos’s, as that film’s own disorienting mystery shifts & mutates in monumental ways – so that its two warring halves almost feel like entirely separate films. By contrast, Monos fully commits to one constant, unwavering tone from start to finish; we never know exactly what’s going to happen next, but we do know how each upcoming event is going to feel. The filmmaking craft & mountainsize ambition of this picture is consistently impressive from scene to scene, but its commitment to a single tonal effect—tense descent into disorder & mayhem—makes it frustrating to emotionally connect with, even after you get past the mystery of its context & purpose.

-Brandon Ledet

Black Mass (2015)

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What the hell has Johnny Depp been doing for the last decade? It used to be that every new Depp performance was worth getting excited about, but the last time I can remember being impressed with him was as the notorious reprobate John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester in 2004’s The Libertine. Everything since feels like a formless blur of pirates, Tontos, and CGI chameleons. No matter. Depp has returned to his past life as a solid, exciting actor in another formally middling biopic packed to the gills with great performances, Black Mass. With his receding hairline, hideous teeth, ever-present aviators & pinky rings, and eyes so grey-blue they almost make him look blind, Depp plays the infamous South Boston crimelord Whitey Bulger like a strange cross between Hunter S. Thompson & Nosferatu. It’s a measured, but menacing performance that proves Depp still has it in him to terrify & captivate, completely transforming beyond recognition & losing himself in his best role of the past decade.

The worst accusation that can be thrown at Black Mass is that it’s a little formally & narratively overfamiliar. The film doesn’t bring anything particularly fresh to the 70s-era organized crime drama format, calling to mind works from names like Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, and Martin Scorsese in nearly every scene. In fact, because of the thick Boston accents inherent to Whitey Bulger & The Winter Hill Gang it’s easy to pinpoint a specific point of reference in Scorsese’s oeuvre that Black Mass can be accused of being a little too reminiscent of: The Departed. Just know that if you’re looking forward to this film as a fan of that genre there’s not going to be long stretches of brutal violence & gunfire that usually accompany organized crime films. Black Mass has its moments of brutality, sure, limited mostly to bursts of fist to face sadism & quick bursts of assassination, but for the most part it’s a calm story of political intrigue. The movie is almost entirely focused on the real-life Bulger’s secretive “alliance” with the FBI that allowed the two agencies to work together to eradicate the Italian mafia from Boston, making room for Bulger to bloom from a small time crime boss into an all-powerful kingpin. Black Mass is concerned with the audio surveillance tapes, buried/forged paperwork, and back alley dealings with the federal government that allowed for Bulger’s rise to power much more than it is with his murderous deeds, which amount to exactly one onscreen shooting & two strangling on Depp’s bloody hands. Bulger is terrifying, but the threat he poses is more systemic than it is physical, making for a film that may have defied the more bloodthirsty expectations of its audience. I noticed quite a few viewers at our screening checking their cellphones in the second & third acts . . .

Any muted expectations I had for Black Mass based on its 70s-era crime drama familiarity (an aesthetic that somehow hilariously continues well into the 90s in the film’s timeline) were surpassed merely on the merit of its performances. Besides Depp’s horrifying, career-revitalizing turn as Whitey Bulger, there’s also great, unexpected screen presence from Kevin Bacon, Adam Scott, Dakota Johnson, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Sarsgaard, and, my personal favorite, Julianne Nichlson (who was fantastic in both Boardwalk Empire & Masters of Sex and whom I only want the best things for). This is an actor’s movie. The 70s crime pastiche is merely a backdrop for the absurdly talented cast’s parade of heavy Boston accents & emotional turmoil. The screenplay offers very little in terms of surprise. Of course Bulger is the kind of gangster that is gentle & neighborly with old ladies, but will have a man killed for threatening to punch him in a bar. Of course, despite his official status as a “top echelon informant”, he’s prone to saying things like, “I don’t consider this ratting or informing. This is business.” Of course, because this is a gangster movie, the script is a long procession of a million “fuck”s, one with just a few homophobic & anti-Italian slurs thrown in there for good measure. I consistently got the feeling that we’ve all seen this play out countless times before, but I still enjoyed it a great deal. Just as a particularly corrupt FBI agent justifies his involvement with Bulger as “a little white lie to protect the bigger truth”, Black Mass is a little, unassuming movie worthwhile for how it supports such a massive list of excellent performances, Depp’s return to form, believe it or not, being just one drop in the bucket.

-Brandon Ledet