Swampflix’s official coverage of the best films of 2023 won’t start until January 2024, but listmaking season is already in full swing elsewhere. General consensus on the best films of the year is starting to take shape as regional film critic associations are publishing their collective Best of the Year lists, and I’m proud to say I was once again able to take a small part in that annual ritual. I voted in the Southeastern Film Critics Association poll for the best films of 2023, representing a consensus opinion among 89 critics across nine states in the American South. Winners were announced this morning, and it’s a pretty solid list. At the very least, it’s cool to see Lily Gladstone get recognition for her star-making work in Killers of the Flower Moon and to see Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall take the prize for Best Foreign-Language Film after winning the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes.
The biggest story of last year’s SEFCA list was the total dominance of the Daniels’ big-hearted sci-fi comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, which went on to be named Swampflix’s Movie of the Year as well. This year, the list was dominated by Christopher Nolan’s nuclear science bio-epic Oppenheimer, which was awarded Best Picture, Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey, Jr.), Best Ensemble, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Score. To quote SEFCA President Scott Phillips in today’s press release, “This fall featured three big films from three grandmasters of cinema. Martin Scorsese released Killers of the Flower Moon. Ridley Scott brought Napoleon to the big screen and Michael Mann hits theaters next week with Ferrari. Despite this bumper crop from heavy-hitting auteurs, Christopher Nolan’s film from six months ago is walking away with eight SEFCA awards. Oppenheimer is a stunning cinematic achievement. Our members recognized that in July, and they are rewarding it in December.”
Welcome to Episode #201 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, James and Brandon discuss cinematic representations of Elvis Presley, from his youth-culture acting chops in Michael Curtiz’s New Orleans noir King Creole (1958) to his recent post-mortem biopic depictions in Baz Luhrman’s Elvis (2022) & Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023).
Awards Season is traditionally the one stretch in the cinematic calendar when pro critics and Hollywood publicists are allowed to aggressively promote Serious Art instead of Tentpole IP. Neither the rush to crank out Best of the Year lists before competing publications nor the wine-and-dine FYC Industry parties that secure Oscar nominations are the most dignified way of highlighting what’s new & great in cinema, but it’s the system we’ve got to work with, and I appreciate the rhythm of the ritual. One of the sure-sign markers that we are deep in Awards Season territory right now is that distributors & publicists are starting to screen movies (the lowest of low-brow artforms) about literature (the highest of high-brow subjects). Anytime an academically minded movie about the morals, politics, and commerce of literature breaks out of the festival circuit to earn theatrical distribution in the final month of the year, you can be sure that it’s being positioned as a serious Awards Contender worthy of critical & industrial accolades. What’s fun about the two high-profile literary titles that recently hit my FYC inbox is that they’re not well-behaved, agreeable participators in that tradition. They’re both political provocations determined to shake up the literary status quo – too thorny to truly be considered Awards Bait crowd-pleasers, to their credit.
The major contender in this pairing is the publishing-world satire American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated English professor who writes a deliberately shitty, racist novel to parody the worst trends of the industry that regularly rejects his pitches, only to be horrified when it’s a runaway success. The film isn’t exactly Bamboozled-level confrontational in its satire of what white audiences want from Black art, but it isn’t far off, giving its fake in-movie novels titles like My Pafology and We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. The movie is often very funny as a cynical skewering of NPR liberalism, even if it often feels like the call is coming from inside the house. More importantly, it might finally be the Jeffrey Wright showcase that graduates him from That Guy character actor to household name (the NPR household, at least). He’s given plenty of space to rattle off humorist dialogue as a fast-talking catty academic, and there’s a surprising amount of sincere domestic drama that fills the space between his satirist jokes. Maybe too much. American Fiction commits the most common sin of adapting a novel to the screen (in this case Erasure by Percival Everett), in that it’s willing to feel busy & overstuffed instead of editing out characters & plot events for a more streamlined narrative. The upside of that approach is that Wright is given room to interact with other greatly talented Black actors like Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Keith David, and Sterling K. Brown, each of whom play characters as complicated as his grumpy cynic protagonist. It’s a funny satire about the grotesque commercialization of “The African American Experience” in modern media, but it’s also just an emotionally satisfying family drama with an excellent cast.
The other literary provocation making the rounds right now is the trans-rights essay film Orlando, My Political Biography, in which philosopher-turned-filmmaker Paul B. Preciado praises & confronts the literary genius of Virginia Woolf. In particular, Preciado stages a conceptually shaky rebuttal to Woolf’s novel Orlando, taking it to task for not holding up to the scrutiny of modern gender & class politics (while also effusively praising it as an artistic triumph with profound personal insight into his own life). Dozens of trans & nonbinary performers announce themselves in the film as a living continuation of the Orlando character, who “changes sex” while asleep halfway into Woolf’s novel. They mix readings from the text with personal accounts of their own lives in the current political push for trans rights, often with Preciado’s narration pushing back on Woolf for making transitioning sound so magically easy & carefree. The performative artifice of the project reminds me a lot of the communal therapy in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing or Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, which create academic playgrounds for real people to work out their real feelings in false environments. Despite that playfulness in form, though, I just wasn’t fully convinced by My Political Biography‘s academic approach to literary representation, especially by the time it starts referring to famous trans women like Christine Jorgensen and Marsha P. Johnson as extensions of Orlando. Woolf’s fantastical novel evokes themes of gender fluidity that might still be applicable to the modern world in abstract terms, but the way this project demands that it concretely speaks for the individual experiences of all trans & nonbinary people gets decreasingly credible the further the metaphor is stretched.
Even if I wasn’t fully convinced by the academic rigor of Orlando, My Political Biography, I still appreciated its daringness as a political & literary provocation. The way it casually claims Virginia Woolf as “perhaps nonbinary” herself, proudly demonstrates hormone shots & top surgery scars as a form of “pharmacoliberation,” and bends every personal monologue from its contributors into an affront to “The Binary Empire” is admirably confrontational as political activism, even if it falls short elsewhere in marrying abstract concepts to individual experiences. There’s also some wonderfully playful anachronism in its attempts to graft Orlando the character onto the modern world, especially in early scenes where a nonbinary performer is modernizing Woolf’s text on a laptop while dressed in football pads & an Elizabethan collar. Likewise, American Fiction makes a few momentary missteps in its academic satire (particularly in its opening-scene parody of “safe space” campus culture), but it’s still admirable for being willing to throw punches in the first place. The movie directly grapples with its own participation in marketing Black stories to apologetic white audiences, culminating in an indecision on how best to conclude its narrative without creating the illusion that the issue of Race in the publishing industry has been resolved. Where it comes ahead as the better film in this pairing is that it manages to pose those kinds of grand political provocations without losing touch with the (fictional) individuals at its center, never speaking for an entire social class through a strict, prescriptive lens. In either case, though, I’m just happy there’s something out there to talk about other than the latest Marvel movie or Tom Cruise actioner; I almost feel like I’ve been reading books instead of mindlessly watching a screen.
One great thing about the Awards Season ritual is that it sets aside a commercially viable space for traditional melodramas, which have otherwise been banished to the depths of Lifetime & Hallmark television broadcasts. The only way you can still attract a sizeable audience to the grandly emotional domestic dramas Hollywood used to routinely market as “women’s pictures” is to save them for Oscar-qualifying runs in the last month of the year, when interviews with their stars are suddenly headline worthy news items instead of background promotional noise. In general, that’s all the Oscars are good for anyway: clearing out a little space in the calendar for wide audiences to discuss & celebrate movies outside the usual big-ticket tentpole IP. Few genres benefit more from that space than the emotional-breakdown acting showcases and lavish period pieces that are traditionally marketed to women, though, if not only for their value as easy filler for Best Actress and Best Costume Design awards ballots. It’s the most blubbering time of the year, and I’m always in need of a good cry.
If there’s any working director who understands the artistic value of the woman’s picture, it’s surely Todd Haynes, who was effectively anointed this generation’s Douglas Sirk after his period-piece melodramas Carol & Far from Heaven. Haynes worked his way back into Awards Consideration this year with May December, a film that purposefully, perversely plays with the hallmarks of modern melodrama in the director’s signature style. The film stars Natalie Portman as a method actor studying the quirks & mannerisms of the real-life tabloid headliner who inspired her latest role, played by longtime Haynes collaborator Julianne Moore. Moore plays a notorious Movie-of-the-Week topic due to the sordid formation of her family, which started in the 90s when she had an affair with a 7th grader, birthed his twin children behind bars, and then married him after prison to cover up the abuse with the cultural fix-all of good old fashioned family values. Portman promises to give Moore’s . . . unique family history the thoughtful, empathetic representation onscreen that was missing from its earlier, trashier depictions, but in the process of studying her subject, she uncovers ugly, festering truths just beneath the peachy family surface: Moore’s continued abuses of manipulative power, the young husband’s stunted emotional development in the years since the crime (played with heartbreaking vulnerability by Charles Melton), and her own twisted attraction to the role.
If there’s anything surprising about May December‘s stature as a serious Awards Contender, it’s that Haynes tells its story through disposable TV Movie aesthetics. Usually when a great directors’ film festival darling gets sidelined on Netflix it’s disappointing; this time it’s darkly funny. Haynes calls attention to the heightened melodrama of the piece by ironically deploying soap opera music stings over minor, everyday domestic concerns, the same way Moore’s character violently sobs every time she overbakes a cake or forgets to buy enough hotdogs for a family cookout. The director is at his most prankish here, riffing on the real-life tabloid story of child rapist Mary Kay Letourneau in a parody of Movie-of-the-Week melodrama, revealing the bizarre details as Portman does research by literally flipping through a tabloid. He takes the emotional pain of the story seriously, though, the same way his Barbie-doll retelling of Karen Carpenter’s tragic life’s story in Superstar is far more dramatically severe in practice than its tongue-in-cheek presentation sounds in the abstract. The hazy soap opera filters, icy camp performances, and throwaway jokes about dwindling hotdog supplies set May December up to be a perverse laugh riot, but Haynes’s love for melodrama is too sincere for things to devolve that way. It’s the same effect as ironic audiences settling in to laugh at the “No more wire hangers!” histrionics of Mommie Dearest, only to be confronted by the film’s non-stop onslaught of genuinely upsetting domestic abuses.
As much as I appreciate Todd Haynes’s unique brand of weaponized irony, I can’t say that May December is my favorite melodrama that screened for critics this Awards Season. That honor belongs to the culinary period piece The Pot-au-Feu, which will eventually be released in the United States as The Taste of Things. The film is a romantically penned love letter to Juliette Binoche, just as every Todd Haynes film is a loving tribute to Julianne Moore. Binoche stars as the most underappreciated chef in 19th Century France, doing all of the complex, hands-on kitchen work that gets the master of her house recognized as “The Napoleon of Gastronomy.” That restaurateur (Benoît Magimel) acknowledges her value as a culinary artist, at least, and he spends every minute they’re not cooking together begging for her hand in marriage. Binoche prefers to let her cooking do the talking and expresses her mutual adoration for her employer through the beauty & poetry of her food. Only he and a small social club of nerdy gourmets (essentially, the world’s first foodie podcast) truly understand her value in the field, but the audience is invited to share in their awe. The emotions in the household get exponentially bigger as the two chefs’ mutual yearning starts to border on ritualistic kink, and it all eventually boils over into a fiery romance with no safety valve. Love, life, and tragedy inevitably ensue.
The Taste of Things is an aggressively sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals – very likely the best film about food since Pig. Its honeyed tone & lighting are absurdly cozy & warm, with handheld camerawork that takes the term “food porn” as literally as it can without indulging in sploshing. Still, the big emotions of its central tearjerker romance place it just as firmly in the melodrama category as Haynes’s latest, which is much colder & more detached. Both are great Wine Mom movies, but only May December plays into that genre with ironic, Lifetime-parodying self-awareness, while The Taste of Things is achingly sincere & straightforward in its full-hearted commitment to melodrama. Maybe that commitment makes it more mawkish & cliche, but it also makes it more emotionally satisfying when it violently yanks your heartstrings the way only the best women’s pictures can.
There are a few tried & true Awards Bait subgenres that always get released in bulk this time of year, in hopes of dredging up some much-coveted Oscar Buzz: the miserabilist drama in which glamorous movie stars bravely ugly themselves up to look like downtrodden commonfolk, the Wikipedia-summary biopic in which movie stars cosplay as recognizable historical figures through prosthetic “transformations”, the buttoned-up period piece that scoops up a couple easy Best Costume Design statues while no one is looking, etc. As much as The Academy has strived to change public perception of what qualifies as “An Oscars Movie” by diversifying its voting membership in recent years, we all still recognize Awards Bait when we see it. That’s what makes it so fun to spot the interlopers among traditional late-in-the-year releases – the trashy genre pictures that somehow get mismarketed as Serious Dramas for Adults to help fill out studios’ FYC publicity campaigns. Every now and then a sickly, grotesque psychological thriller like Jokerwill win a couple Oscars because it happens to star Joaquin Phoenix, who was grandfathered in as an Awards Contender from past, prestigious work. The Shape of Water, The Silence of the Lambs, Misery, Traffic, Training Day, Suicide Squad, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . . . There’s room for one or two trashy genre pictures to sneak into every Awards Season conversation, often resulting in the Oscars’ most controversial Major Category wins. Personally, I always find the chaotic discourse sparked by those lowly genre outliers amusing this time of year, since everything else about the Awards Season ritual feels so predictably repetitive & set in stone.
Since the hyperbolic decrying of Joker as “dangerous” and (more credibly) creatively bankrupt in 2019, I’m not sure there’s been a more divisive genre winner than Emerald Fennell’s debut Promising Young Woman, which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar the very next year (among five nominations, including Best Picture). A bitterly funny rape revenge thriller with a music video pop art aesthetic, Promising Young Woman was mostly treated as a Serious Film worthy of awards consideration because of its relevance to #MeToo era feminism. If released in any other context than the Awards Season window the year Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to prison, it likely would have been ignored by the Awards Industry establishment, as most high-style, low-logic thrillers are. Instead, it became a hotly debated item of great political importance that year, picked apart for months by critics and the general commentariat for the ways its feminist talking points fall apart under politically informed scrutiny (especially as it resolves in last-minute copaganda). Just a couple years later, Fennell’s follow-up, Saltburn, is repeating the same pattern. An airport paperback mockbuster version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saltburn is trashy, catty pulp that has the misfortune of being marketed & evaluated as Serious Art. It’s another deliciously styled, politically vapid thriller from Fennell, who still has yet to learn how to land a dismount in the last few pages of her screenplays but fills those pages with plenty eye candy to keep you smiling on the journey to that letdown. If released in the summer under any other director’s name, it would likely get by okay as Skinsploitation schlock, but the film festival & FYC awards screener ritual is unkind to that kind of beach-read indulgence – whether or not it eventually wins her a second Oscar.
I don’t think all of this instant, widespread scrutiny is healthy for Emerald Fennell’s art or career. Saltburn is an improvement over Promising Young Woman in most formalist contexts, but her loopy screenwriting impulses & confused politics persist here in a way that’s going to make her a repeat target for vitriolic discourse if she doesn’t start cutting her teeth on quieter projects. Here, she makes a grand political statement on the issue of Class instead of the issue of Misogyny, tracking the sinister social ladder maneuvers of a cash-strapped Barry Keoghan among the friends, family, and portraits of “dead rellies” on Jacob Elordi’s grand, titular estate. Anyone who’s ever seen a class-interloper thriller before knows exactly where Saltburn is going about halfway into the first act, so it’s unclear how shocking the details of Keoghan’s violent climb up the University of Oxford social ladder are supposed to be as they’re gradually doled out as gotcha reveals. The details of his obsessive, covetous attraction to Elordi’s dirtbag rich boy hunk are a fun diversion from the FYC season’s traditionally stuffy, buttoned up fare, though, especially by the time Keoghan is slurping up Elordi’s bathwater after a vigorous jerk off session. There’s a lot to be annoyed about in Saltburn if you’re looking for critical ammunition: the impatient trailer & recap montages that bookend the story, the choice to frame the grand opulence of its vast exteriors in Academy Ratio, the anachronistic needle drops that fall outside its 2006 setting, etc. I guess I just didn’t take it seriously enough to be enraged by it, the way much more serious critics are. To me, it falls more in the trashy, disposable lineage of a Gossip Girl, Cruel Intentions,Fierce People, or Do Revenge than in the lineage of great works like Mr. Ripley or Kind Hearts & Coronets. It’s dumb, harmless fun.
I at least understand how Fennell’s precedence as a promising Oscar Winner earns Saltburn an automatic slot in the Awards Season conversation. The Thomasin McKenzie vehicle Eileen is more of an enigma in that context, even though it’s the better film. Is it McKenzie’s association with recent (and likewise divisive) Oscar-winner Jojo Rabbit? Is it the venerated movie star glamour of co-star Anne Hathaway? Hard to say. The marketing for Eileen seems to be leaning on its Christmastime setting and its themes of lesbian obsession to position it as an indulgence in Carol cosplay. Calling it “Carol for perverts” might be bordering on redundancy, so maybe let’s settle for “Carol as dime store paperback noir.” It’s as if a Patricia Highsmith obsessive found Todd Haynes’s adaptation of The Price of Salt a little too classy to properly represent her work, so it was time to dirty up her reputation again. As soon as its title card materializes in throwback 40s noir font, it’s clear that the movie is having fun with familiar genre tropes, resurrecting an outdated mode of crime thriller screenwriting in seedy homage. What follows is a fun, loopy, perversely detailed daydream that doesn’t make much sense in the context of real-world logic, but follows the sweaty, impulsive logic of noir-era crime novels. It’s a story told through intrusive thoughts, illustrating the violent & sexual fantasies of McKenzie’s character as she imagines fucking or killing everyone within arm’s reach – depending on whichever desire applies. It takes a while for her to lose the distinction between imagined behavior vs. real-world action, saving the movie’s physically violent turn for third-act catharsis, but there’s plenty trashy, sordid imagery to string the audience along to that shocker conclusion.
Like Saltburn, Eileen is less commendable for the events of its plot than it is for the tensions between its two main characters. McKenzie’s protagonist is just as much of a violent little outsider weirdo as Keoghan’s; she just does as a better job of managing her violent impulses . . . for a while. She stars as a lonely small-town prison employee with no regular social interaction outside the verbal abuses of her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham), who describes her as a non-person, the 1960s equivalent of an NPC. Filling her days with chronic masturbation and daydreams of bloodshed, she’s shaken out of her routine by the hiring of a new prison psychologist: a chain-smoking Hitchcock blonde played by an unusually devious Hathaway. The film’s visual echoes of Carol set up an expectation that Hathaway will be more involved in the central drama than she really is; she’s really just there to accelerate the obsessive, intrusive impulses of McKenzie’s imagination until tragedy inevitably strikes. Like in Saltburn, the lurid promise of their same-sex attraction is never physically consummated between bedsheets, but instead pays off in murder. Neither work could be credibly accused of “queerbaiting”, though, since their main characters’ sexual desires are explicitly detailed to the point of obsessive kink. It’s just that they’re both more psychological thrillers about intensely strange social outsiders than they are proper erotic thrillers about genuine, dangerous relationships. Most of the sordid action takes place in the characters’ warped imaginations. In that context, Eileen is the more satisfying movie of the pair, since it’s more of a thorough character study of a single person’s psyche than it is diagnostic of a larger, metaphorical social issue.
I don’t mean for this pairing to be predictive of either film’s Awards Season chances. I have no idea whether Saltburn or Eileen will make a dent on professional publications’ Best of the Year lists or stick around for the grueling gauntlet of Oscars Discourse. I’m only responding to them in this context because they were screened for critics’ Awards Consideration in the final month of the year instead of being unceremoniously ignored the way most trashy, pulpy thrillers are for rest of the calendar. The reasoning for that awards push is baffling to me in both cases, outside maybe the chance they give their actors to try out new, exotic accents onscreen (English & New English, respectively). I welcome the kind of discoursive chaos genre films like this bring to the Awards Season ritual, though, no matter how little they belong in conversation or how annoying that conversation gets when they happen to break through & win something.
You might assume that the ideal way to watch the 1985 supernatural Italo horror Demons would be to see it projected in the oldest operating cinema in town, in our case the original location of The Prytania. In the film, a group of strangers are gifted free tickets to a mysterious horror film at an ancient cinema that has materialized out of the urban void. That movie turns out to be a gory cheapie about an ancient mask buried in Nostradamus’s tomb. We watch this story unfold twice removed, where movie-within-a-movie victims try on the cursed mask, which transforms them into demonic, flesh-eating demons who torment their companions. Meanwhile, the in-film audience of the movie squirms in their seats, noticing an alarming resemblance of the mysterious horror film’s violence to their own journeys to the screening. Mainly, the promotional mask prop displayed in the cinema’s lobby has cut one of their cheeks the same way it cut & infected characters in the film they’re watching, which of course leads to a demon-zombie breakout in the theater that matches the chaos of the movie within the movie. They’re all effectively Skinamarinked—unable to leave the theater thorough the doors they entered from—as they individually transform into cannibalistic monsters and tear each other to shreds. Seeing Demons in a classic single-screener cinema could only add an extra layer of uncanny meta-horror to that gory practical-effects display, especially if the cinema in question could cover the insurance costs of blocking the exits and cutting their customer’s cheeks at the box office.
It turns out there’s an even better way to see Demons, though, one that trades in the layered meta-aesthetics of a haunted cinema for the open-aired joviality of a family barbeque. Italian prog rock composer Claudio Simonetti recently toured one of the several undead mutations of his band Goblin to play live accompaniment for Demons in concert venues around the country, including The Broad’s outdoor extension The Broadside. The show was rigidly timed to a Tim & Eric style video package that opens with a postcard from Simonetti & Demons director Lamberto Bava, then concludes with a greatest-hits medley of 70s & 80s horror scores, most of which Simonetti composed under the Goblin name. In-between, the band played a reworked, bulked-up version of the Demons score to a full screening of the film, emphasizing both how few scenes prompted them to pause for dialogue and how frequently its now-anthemic theme is repeated for the gnarliest sequences of over-the-top gore. As for Demons itself, it’s got one of the greatest opening acts in all of nonsense Italo horror cinema, capturing the feeling of collectively dreaming at the movies without distracting itself with minor concerns like plot & coherence. Once the in-film movie projector and auditorium are torn apart there isn’t much glue to hold the whole thing together, though, save for the repetition in Simonetti’s synth riffs, so it was great to hear them cranked up to an obnoxious volume. By the end, the familiarity of those riffs gave the screening a celebratory, communal air – the culmination of a once-in-a-lifetime Halloween season of great movies screening at The Broad (including several directed by Demons producer Dario Argento).
Years ago, the hot horror-nerd ticket would have been to see the full classic Goblin line-up play a live score for Suspriria, a tour that (to my knowledge) never came through New Orleans. If you’re going to see “Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin” live instead (a variation of the band that only includes Simonetti from Goblin’s original membership), you might as well see them play a live score for Demons, since it’s a film that Simonetti scored after the legendary band had originally broken up. He might primarily be a solo composer, but you can tell Simonetti loves having a full band behind him, playing rockstar in his denim jacket & wallet chain combo. The encore set after Demons concluded touched on plenty of classic-Goblin staples, including themes from Dawn of the Dead, Suspriria, and (in my book, their finest work) Deep Red. It also included some wonderfully bizarre choices that rivaled Bava’s shoddy surrealist filmmaking in Demons, most notably in the glitchy-GIF repetition of the classic New Line Cinema logo while performing the theme from Cut & Run and in their prog rock remix of John Carpenter’s Halloween score, transforming a notoriously sparse piano line into an overcomplicated monster. I still would love to see Demons projected in an antique venue like The Prytania someday, just for the proper sense of ambiance. I can’t imagine it’ll be a more memorable or endearing evening than that evening at The Broadside, though, where the stage lights twinkling off Simonetti’s absurdly long wallet chain were like stars twinkling in the night sky.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Next Gen Star Trek time travel episode First Contact (1996).
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.
Welcome to Episode #199 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon and Britnee discuss all things Sex and the City, from the groundbreaking television show to its bloated movie sequels and its streaming era follow-up And Just Like That. Enjoy!
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