In its most shameless hours, there isn’t much difference between Vice News journalism and the Mondo exploitation movies of the 1960s & 70s. Vice has well earned its reputation for bravely tackling subjects more traditional news media won’t touch, but that bravery often translates to a kind of in-your-face bravado that can cross over into shock-value exploitation. There’s a thin line between reporting on real-world violence and profiting from horrific images of that violence, and that line gets especially blurry when you package those images with youth-culture music & aesthetic signifiers. Of course, that pseudo-documentary/pseudo-exploitation hybrid journalism bothered me a lot more in the 2010s, when Vice News hit peak popularity and I’d be casually confronted with its graphic violence via friends’ TV & laptop screens while just going about my day. It all came back to me watching the 2007 documentary Manda Bala, though, which plays like a Citizen Kane-sized cornerstone in establishing the cinematic language of aggro hipster journalism in the Vice News era.
Self-billed as “a film that cannot be shown in Brazil”, Manda Bala is a high-style documentary about brazen crime & corruption in that country, the unlikely center of which is the world’s largest frog farm. At its core, it’s a film about extreme wealth disparity in mid-2000s São Paulo, transitioning between interview subjects via scale-busting helicopter shots of the sprawling city’s skyscrapers & slums. It documents crimes on the furthest ends of those economic extremes: flagrant political corruption that steals massive amounts of money from impoverished communities and those communities’ frequent kidnappings of the ultra-wealthy’s family members for quick ransom payouts. The frog farm is just one of many money-laundering schemes on the political corruption end, but it’s one that offers the film a point of visual interest as the overpopulated frog nests are rife woth amphibian cannibalism. Besides the unapologetically corrupt owner of that farm, other interviewees include former kidnapping victims, currently active kidnappers, anti-kidnapping detectives, bulletproof car salesmen, and a plastic surgeon who specializes in reconstructing kidnapping victims’ severed ears with their own rib cartilage. Hostage videos, surgery footage, and ballistics tests constantly escalate the violence of the film’s imagery while it alternates between shockingly candid interviews with the people who suffer that violence every day. Sometimes, the film’s eagerness to entertain feels callously flippant given the severity of its subject (especially in its upbeat Tropicália music cues), but its retro, shot-on-film aesthetic is gorgeous and its on-the-street reporting pulls no punches when detailing the violence on either side of the poverty line.
My used DVD copy of Manda Bala boasts that the film won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, among a second prize for Best Cinematography. Given the state of the infotainment documentary in the mid-2000s, I believe that prize was deserved. The tonal mix of hipster cool cred & violent bloodshed in Manda Bala may have made me a bit queasy, but there’s no question that it’s better crafted than the nonstop onslaught of rote, cheapo digi-docs about George Bush, Wal-Mart, climate change, and the meat industry that cluttered up Blockbuster Video shelves throughout that decade. As much as the film relishes the quirky frog-farm imagery and Mondo hyperviolence of its subject, it does consistently hit the right political targets — explaining that the kidnapping epidemic is a direct symptom of the poverty caused by corruption, then going on to explain how that corruption is just a modern extension of historical Portuguese colonization. The film likely has just as legitimate of a claim as being a precursor to recent high-style arthouse documentaries like The Act of Killing & Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat as it does being a precursor to Vice News web broadcasts, but something about the confrontational, Mondo-style imagery read pure Vice to me. Maybe I’m too squeamish to differentiate true, hard-hitting journalism from shock-value exploitation; or maybe it’s okay to do a little of the latter if it draws attention to the former.
When preparing my review for Eddington, I couldn’t remember the bizarrely specific Pokémon-themed name that was going to be given to the AI data center being built outside of the titular town. In searching for a script for it online in order to get this name, I stumbled across a Reddit post that contained the screenplay for both that film and Weapons, and I inadvertently read a spoiler about Weapons in the beginning of the post before I could click away. To be honest, I didn’t believe it when I read it. It seemed like too much of a departure from what the advertising had presented, and I couldn’t reconcile the images that were already rattling around in my head from the trailers with the spoiler, let alone with the discourse already surrounding the film, all of which had firmly already centered itself around (pre)reading the “disappeared kids” narrative as being a school shooting metaphor. The spoiler didn’t ruin the overall experience for me, but it did mean that I knew what the motivation was behind the film’s events before the film revealed itself, and I wish that I could have experienced this for the first time without that foreknowledge.
The film’s poster tagline is also part of its opening narration: “[One] night, at 2:17 am, [almost] every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark … and never came back.” We see this first school day with most of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)’s class having failed to show up, all except for timid Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). A month later, there are still no clues as to the children’s location, and the community is still in a state of perpetual outcry, with particularly outspoken local contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) calling for Justine’s arrest until she can explain what happened, a conflict that Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) attempts to prevent from escalating. We learn that Justine has had previous trouble with alcoholism and that this event has led her to drowning her sorrows once again, which leads her to have a one-night stand with an old ex, police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). Based on the pre-release information we had, one would assume that Justine would be our sole main character as we follow her along her investigation into the disappearance of her students (or that perhaps she is responsible and that the film will focus on Archer’s discovery of the extent of her involvement), but the film takes a different narrative approach, instead breaking its story into multiple sections that each focus on one character.
Justine’s is first, of course, so that we can watch her struggle with facing the community of Maybrook while having no more answers to the children’s disappearance than they do, up to the point when she’s attacked by an apparently possessed friend, at which point the film then switches points of view to follow Archer. We see him waking up in the bed of his missing son, apparently regretting all the love he failed to show the boy when he had the chance (as we see later in Alex’s point of view section, Archer’s son Matthew is an outright bully, perhaps because of this lack of affection). He’s losing track of things at work, placing wrong orders and forgetting others entirely, and this scattered thinking can only refocus on one target: Justine. He’s frustrated with what he feels is insufficient investigation on the part of police captain Ed (Toby Huss), so he begins to follow Justine and vandalizes her car, but he comes to see that she’s just as lost in all of this as he is. I don’t want to get into all of the ins and outs of what we learn from each of these intersections between the character-focused sections because they’re much more interesting to see play out non-linearly, almost Magnolia style (which director Zach Cregger has admitted is an inspiration), before they weave into one another. It makes the whole thing feel grounded, filling in little realistic details through naturalistic dialogue — conversations about the excitement of coming home early from a business trip because it means that you’ll be home when you’re ovulating, Archer’s wife’s exasperated “I’m going to work” when she finds him asleep in missing Matthew’s room yet again, and the way that homeless addict James (Austin Abrams) spins a threadbare web of transparent but plausible lies to try and extort tiny bits of cash from friends still willing to take a call from him. There are large swathes of the film where you’ll completely forget that there’s a potentially supernatural mystery at play here because you’ll be more invested in the lives of the characters. That’s good filmmaking, baby.
Weapons is doing pretty well on the discourse circuit. The film’s barely been out for a couple of days as I write this (on the Monday after the film’s release, having seen it in a packed theater Friday evening), and there are already many different takes on the film’s themes. I barely looked at social media today and saw more than a dozen memes about the meal that Marcus and his husband have prepared for their TV time (it includes seven hot dogs, ruffled potato chips, baby carrots, an ungodly amount of what I presume is ranch dressing, and chocolate chip cookies — iconic), and YouTuber Ryan Hollinger has already put out a video in which he claims that the film’s overall thesis is about alcoholism (even though I don’t completely agree with his analysis). Although alcoholism and addiction in general are running themes through the film, I think that the presence of these diseases is more about showing character through the ways that addiction can compel people to be the worst version of themselves. That compulsion isn’t limited to drinking or shooting up, though, as we see with Archer and how his vandalism and lack of focus are the result of his grief. If anything, the film is about parasitism and the way that parasites can compel their hosts, with addictive compulsion (i.e. the proverbial monkey on one’s back), sexual impulsivity, and grief themselves acting as metaphors for having a parasite that controls you, as the film’s villainous force does. I won’t say more than that to save you from being spoiled the way that I was.
In discussion about the film over the weekend, a friend brought up that one critic’s complaint was that Cregger will always opt to go for a joke rather than a scare, and while I think that’s an oversimplification of the director’s style, I also don’t think it’s inaccurate, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. This is a movie about children disappearing, parents bereft of answers, communities in mourning, leaders navigating grief and expectations, and finding solace in feeding one’s diseases while also being very, very funny. Sometimes, Cregger will just throw in a little piece of weirdness just for the hell of it (the giant floating AR-15 with 2:17 shining out of it in LED alarm clock letters being the most obvious example), and that’s also a delight. It’s a rich vein for evaluation and re-evaluation, and I could possibly be enticed to see this one a second time while it’s in theaters. Recapitulating the jokes would be just as bad as giving away the ending (which is itself very cathartic and bloodily hilarious), so I’ll just give this one a whole-hearted recommendation and send you on your way, dear reader.
Marvel Studios’ output is quickly thinning in both volume and in cultural significance, with most of the studio’s episodic superhero adventures now being siphoned off to their rightful place: television. Superhero movies’ stranglehold on multiplex screen space is finally loosening, and the newfound breathing room is allowing for a wider range of theatrical counterprogramming to share the marquee with the usual Disney-brand corporate clutter. It’s also allowing former Marvel Studios directors to express themselves in more personal art, freed from the boardroom & shareholder obligations that come with billion-dollar IP. In the past, whenever Marvel picked up an indie-darling director like a James Gunn or a Taika Waititi, it meant that they would be trapped into churning out corporate #content for the rest of their careers, the same way James Cameron has voluntarily imprisoned himself in an Avatar sequel factory of his own design. This year has seen two exciting breaks from that trend, and together they suggest that there’s a very specific formula for escaping the creative funk that usually results from Marvel Studios employment. Both Sinners and Freaky Tales find MCU alumni from Oakland going out their way to depict cunnilingus and white supremacist ass whoopings in gory genre-mashup musicals, begging to be categorized in one of those two-movie Letterboxd lists with absurdly long titles. While one of those Oaklander pattern-breakers found great financial success in every American multiplex, the other had only a whisper of a theatrical rollout before quietly popping up on HBO Max months later. Still, they combine to represent a hope for a brighter future, one with fewer superhero blockbusters, more onscreen sex, and populist art that’s unafraid to alienate fanboy bigots.
Captain Marvel co-directors Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck have assembled a mixtape homage to Fleck’s youth in 1980s Oakland. Old school rapper Too $hort acts as a local cultural ambassador for the scene, which is a smart move for two white directors depicting a city so widely associated with Black pop culture. Besides coining the title Freaky Tales in one of his classic tracks, Too $hort also acts as the anthology film’s wraparound narrator, appears in a cameo role, and is depicted as an onscreen character by fellow Bay Area rapper Symba (who acts out the film’s onscreen depiction of cunnilingus, an essential part of the Marvel-deviation formula). More improbably, Freaky Tales also features a lengthy battle-rap performance of the infamously raunchy Too $hort track “Don’t Fight the Feelin’,” something I can confidently say I never expected to see given the superhero origin story treatment in a movie. Likewise, I never thought I’d see a fictional depiction of an Operation Ivy concert in a movie either, which is where this violent Oaklander saga begins. In the first section, the local Oakland punk scene bands together to violently dispose of the Nazi skinheads who repeatedly crash their (seemingly nightly) Operation Ivy shows. This is followed by the “Don’t Fight the Feelin'” origin story, a video store crime spree featuring celebrities Tom Hanks & Pedro Pascal and, finally, a heist sequence in which Golden State Warrior star Sleepy Floyd plays a career-high basketball game before slaughtering the home-invading thugs who kill his family while he’s on the court. Besides the local legend of Too $hort, Ben Mendelson is the main connective piece between these freaky tales, playing a creepy cop who houses & deploys Nazi skinheads to do his evil bidding. Every tale is about stomping those Nazi shitheads into the ground, and yet the mixtape soundtrack does not include the Dead Kennedys classic “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” likely because that song spiritually belongs to San Francisco on the other side of The Bay.
There are some retro cult-cinema signifiers here that ring a little hollow, especially in its Pulp Fiction-aping anthology format and its dual use of both video tape tracking and visible reel changes via digital filters. Still, Freaky Tales feels convincingly authentic to Fleck’s civic pride, adapting his & Boden’s superhero filmmaking impulses to something more personal & heartfelt. The visual manifestation of there being something special in the air in mid-80s Oakland is in the frequent strikes of green lightning, a supernatural power that flows through major players like Too $hort, Sleepy Floyd, and the Operation Ivy scenesters. It’s a communal energy that sometimes translates to Scanners-style superpowers, but for the most part it’s more vibe than fact. The real power here is the communal ability to stomp out Nazi bigots when everyone works in unison, which the movie has a lot of fun depicting in absurdly bloody detail during its biggest action set pieces. There are no fewer than four song changes during Sleepy Floyd’s slaughter of the home-invading skinheads, so that he can act out his Bruce-Lee-doing-Blade superhero fantasy for as long as the budget will allow. Freaky Tales loves Oakland, hates Nazis, and believes Too $hort to be the golden god of the local scene, which is a sentiment with more auteurist specificity & political conviction than you will find in any Marvel movie. It cannot pretend to share the same cultural impact as fellow Oaklander-done-good genre mashup Sinners, but it does share its refreshing glimpse into a post-MCU future, where big-budget movies are surprising & fun again and the furthest-right end of their potential audience is no longer coddled for the sake of making a few extra bucks.
It’s generally bad practice to review a movie’s cultural context (or, worse, its tabloid press) instead of reviewing the movie itself, but I cannot resist the bait this time. The new genre-spoof legacyquel The Naked Gun is review-proof in the way most absurdly silly comedies are. Its plot, construction, and themes are all secondary to its efficiency in telling jokes, which are better experienced onscreen than in text. As a joke-delivery system, The Naked Gun may not hit the same rapid-fire rhythm as previous Police Squad! movies from the 80s & 90s, but it does hit the same success rate as previous Lonely Island-brand movies from director Akiva Shaffer (Popstar, Hot Rod); it’s very funny from start to end. The most surprising & rewarding aspect of the movie has occurred offscreen, however, playing out in the tabloid headlines of grocery store checkout lines. Regardless of whether you’ve seen the film, you’re likely already aware of the unexpected real-life romance that’s developing between its two stars, whom I can say with full confidence we are all rooting for. It was top of my mind watching the movie opening weekend, anyway, to the point where it was actively informing & enhancing the text instead of distracting from it. There is something innocently, infectiously sweet about Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson’s tabloid flirtations that makes this goof-a-second spoof feel more substantial & relevant than it possibly could otherwise – so much so that my everyday happiness is now directly tied to their still-developing romance. It’s already a generous enough gift that the new power couple gave me an opportunity to laugh all the way through an 85-minute comedy with my friends, but now I desperately need them to stay together until one of the three of us dies. They have made me their snowman.
If the significance of being Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson’s snowman is lost on you, it’s because you have not yet seen The Naked Gun. I am citing the kind of absurdist, for-its-own-sake gag that can only be referenced through the vaguest terms without spoiling what makes it funny. The highest compliment I can pay to The Naked Gun is to report that it is tightly packed with those snowman gags, each of which had me laughing myself breathless in public: the owl dad, the heat-vision dog, the jazz club scat, the bodycam chili dogs, and so on. There is no shortage of deliriously silly nonsense. Of course, it gets away with indulging in that goofball free-for-all because it’s working within a familiar structure that doesn’t require set-up or explanation. Shaffer’s The Naked Gun continues the same detective-story spoofery as the ZAZ-era Naked Gun films, dusted off with a few updated cultural references. Liam Neeson stars as Frank Drebin, Jr., son of the deadpan dolt police detective Frank Drebin played by Leslie Neilson in the original series. In fact, Drebin’s entire LAPD station is staffed by the sons of former Police Squad! characters, allowing for metatextual jabs at both the film’s own preposterous participation in the legacyquel format and the real-life legacy of former Naked Gun actor O.J. Simpson. Neeson’s casting is smart beyond his name’s homophonic resemblance to Neilson’s. He’s similarly self-serious as an onscreen persona, having now starred in almost two solid decades of post-Taken thrillers worthy of goofy self-parody. He plays Frank Drebin, Jr. with the straightest face he can manage, which makes all of his overly literal, Amelia Bedelia misunderstandings of basic figures of speech consistently funny. The investigation in this specific episode also deals with a megalomaniac tech-bro Elon Musk stand-in (Danny Huston) to help bring the Naked Gun format up to date, and there are specific parodic references to recent thriller titles like Mission: Impossible – Fallout that do the rest of that work. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a modern-day Naked Gun movie, except with a few self-contained, sketch-comedy deviations specific to its director’s Lonely Island pedigree.
What I did not expect from a modern-day Naked Gun was to be emotionally moved by its central romance. Filling the role of previous series love interest Priscilla Presley, Pamela Anderson co-stars as Neeson’s buxom femme fatale Beth Davenport. An author of “true crime” novels based on stories that she “makes up” herself, Davenport becomes overly involved in the investigation of her software-engineer brother’s death, teaming up with Drebin to take down the Musky supervillain who killed him. After an initial noir-trope meeting in the Venetian-blinds shadows of Drebin’s office, the unlikely pair are caught off-guard by how immediately, intensely attracted they are to each other, which is impossible to fully differentiate from Neeson & Anderson’s publicity-cycle romance. Many of the broader noir tropes spoofed here ring true to their real-life relationship, especially when Drebin laments that he wakes up every day in his “lonely cop apartment” mourning his “dead cop wife,” echoing Neeson’s recent public perception as a perpetually grieving widower. Likewise, Davenport’s eagerness to get in on the action of the Police Squad investigation as a true-crime junkie recalls Anderson’s struggle to earn her way back onto the big screen after Hollywood discarded her as leftover 90s eye candy. I was happy to see her shine in a role worthy of her recent late-career makeover after that Delicate Betty Boop magnetism was wasted by last year’s Awards Season dud The Last Showgirl. I was also relieved to see Neeson back in the tabloids for something that wasn’t sexually objectifying or bizarrely racist. More so that I can ever remember, I am genuinely happy for this millionaire celebrity couple and emotionally invested in their long-term success. As for The Naked Gun, it’s difficult to guess what its own long-term success might be. It’s neither as densely packed with rewindable background visual gags as the original Naked Gun series nor as instantly rewatchable as the sing-along music video sketches of Shaffer’s Popstar, but it’s still dependably funny and—for at least as long as its real-life love affair lasts—romantically sweet.
I remember waiting at the bus stop at Republic Square in Austin in early 2020 when a friend texted me about the controversy surrounding Alison Brie’s Horse Girl, and the alleged plagiarism that the film committed against a smaller indie title, The God Inside My Ear. He said that it looked very bad for Brie, and when I read the list of supposed direct lifts that Horse Girl took from God Inside, it did seem pretty damning. Months later, Brandon nominated Horse Girl as a topic for the podcast, and I mentioned that I had read it was heavily plagiaristic, but when I tried to follow up on it at that time, it seemed like those allegations had been dropped (although I can’t seem to find an article confirming that anymore, since Google is essentially useless now). I remember reading through all of the comments on a message board where people had taken the opportunity to take potshots at Brie and how assured everyone had been that she had definitely stolen some valor, only for a post to come up a year later with screenshots that seemed to disprove every contention that the creator of God Inside had made, and what a turnaround there had been on what people thought she had done. I remember the satisfaction that came with Brie’s vindication, that I could rest assured that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Not my Annie Edison! Not my Trudy Campbell!
I hadn’t heard of Together at all when Brandon mentioned that he was trying to find a screening of it in New Orleans. Coincidentally, a friend in town sent a message in one of our group chats that a friend of his had highly recommended Together and organized an outing, although when we got to the theater he realized that he had spent all of that time confused and thinking about the upcoming Weapons instead. Somehow, I missed all of the marketing for this one, and when I mentioned it to another friend, he said that there was again a plagiarism scandal circling around it. I read the article from The Wrap summarizing the similarities between Together and a 2023 indie script titled Better Half; both texts are about a heterosexual couple who end up beginning to physically merge with one another, featuring “two central couples […] composed of one codependent partner and a commitment-phobic artist,” and the use of the Spice Girls song “2 Become 1.” And that does seem kind of damning, doesn’t it? I’m of two minds about this, because the last time this happened, it became clear that the director of God Inside was grasping at straws and whether they were doing so to get more attention for their film or their efforts were earnest and in good faith, Horse Girl was very much its own bizarre, beautiful thing. Any similarities were superficial at best.
As for the points of comparison between Better Half and Together, I’m not at all convinced that a low angle reverse shot on two actors with their heads tilted toward one another constitutes plagiarizing an image, and if you’re a millennial making a movie about two people merging together (an uncommon but not unique concept) then the use of “2 Become 1” seems like a perfectly natural creative choice for multiple creators from the same generation to make. And why the vague language around “commitment-phobic artist”? Franco’s character is a musician who’s having issues with intimacy because he’s haunted by having discovered his parents’ decomposing bodies and has his doubts about uprooting from a life spent entirely in the city and relocating to a wooded rural area. The “artist” in Better Half could be anything—a painter, a sculptor, a playwright—whose commitment issues could be characterized in a completely different manner. On the other hand … it’s weird that this has happened twice, right? That Wrap article indicates that the producers of Better Half intentionally sought out Franco and Brie’s involvement with their production, which does paint everything in a slightly different light. I’m not really sure what to think at this point, other than to say that I absolutely lovedTogether.
The film opens on an homage to The Thing, as two dogs assisting a man in a woodland search for a couple of missing hikers drink from the same underground well and begin behaving strangely, then begin to merge into a single horrifying dogthing that night in their kennel. Elsewhere, Tim (Franco) is rummaging around in some boxes of records when he comes across some photos of his parents, which rattle him. Girlfriend Millie (Brie) has gotten a teaching job in a small town, and she asks him to come back to the going away party that their friends are holding for them, mentioning that people think that it’s cute that the two are in matching outfits; when Tim returns to the party, he’s changed clothes. Millie performs a (not so) mock proposal to Tim at the party which goes poorly, and the air is still thick with tension when they’re settling into their new home, as the change of scenery hasn’t alleviated Tim of the horrifying image of his rotting parents, and Millie’s increased frustration with his resultant impotence, combined with his poor reaction to the proposal, make her doubt their ability to go the distance. The two get caught in a rainstorm on an intended romantic hike and end up collapsing into the same underground space that we saw the dogs exploring in the film’s opening, and the two of them end up reluctantly drinking the water. When they uncouple the next morning, they seem to be sticking together, and things only get worse from there.
There’s a lot to be grossed out by here, certainly, but it’s not nearly as gross as other recent genre entries like The Substance or The Ugly Stepsister, and, like those films, the “horror” part of the body horror genre is the least important part. Stepsister’s examination of the presumed protagonistic gaze of the fairy tale as a genre is the destination while the lengths to which the title character is physically molded and the resultant revulsion thereof is merely the vessel to take us there. As for The Substance, I have a hard time calling that one “body horror” at all because it’s not a “horror” movie, but a comedy that happens to use self-mutilation, unwashed hands molesting shrimp, and pulsating tumors as comedic beats. Together is the same body horror* with an asterisk because the point here isn’t to make your stomach churn; it’s to tell a love story, with the fact that the way that the characters “come together” is nauseating being much less relevant than the emotional core of Tim and Millie’s relationship. To reach back further for a different example, David Cronenberg’s The Brood was created in the wake of his acrimonious divorce from Margaret Hindson, and that subtext is present in the film in the way that Cronenberg’s marriage is reflected in Frank and Nola Carveth’s, but it never feels like The Brood is about that. The film rushes headlong toward the harrowing body horror images of its final act, with the Carveth family’s dissolution serving as the scaffolding on which the meat of the film, its imagery, hangs. The narrative is merely the means to the film’s haunting visuals’ end. The reverse is true in Together, where the scenes in which Tim nearly chokes to death on Millie’s hair in their sleep or the two wake up to find that their sharing a single forearm are the set dressing that surrounds the primary focus, which is what it really means to take “the plunge” with someone.
What a lot of people don’t seem to be talking about is just how funny Together is; it got a lot of laughs out of me. In a scene following the first time that Tim’s separation anxiety from Millie is made physically manifest, he sees a doctor who prescribes him valium (“It’s called diazepam now,” the doc says, which Tim repeats later to Millie in one of the film’s many repeated dialogue gags) and tells him about a hiker couple who went missing in the woods near Tim and Millie’s house, calling it “big news” at the time. Tim, snobbishly, asks if it was bigger news than “Local man waters garden”; later, when reading an article on the local newspaper’s website about the missing hikers, the side-pane article on the website has that exact phrase as its headline. (Admittedly, I was the only person in my screening who laughed at this bit.) There’s an insightfulness about relationships and their awkward moments that are cleverly captured in the dialogue and make for some quality humor. That same cleverness carries over into the way that certain lines are repeated between the film’s first and second halves, like “If we don’t split now, it’ll be much harder down the line,” and the changing context of that screenplay symmetry.
This was a crowd pleaser, as well as a crowd grosser-outer. All of the group with whom I saw Together were delighted by it, and no one seemed particularly excited about hugging one another as we went our separate ways. Although it has a couple of instances of all out shunting, it’s pretty palatable for anyone who wouldn’t identify themselves as squeamish. If nothing else, I’m making damn certain that I take my LifeStraw with me the next time I go on a romantic hike.
Civil engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) finds himself alone in Anselmo’s Bar one night with two tickets to see the Broadway’s Chicka-Boom-Boom musical revue. He approaches an equally lonely woman (Fay Helm) in an extravagant hat and convinces her to accompany him, as he has been stood up. At the show, prima donna performer Estela Moneteiro (Aurora Miranda, sister of Carmen) is wearing identical head garb for her performance and grows incensed when she spots that a woman in the audience is wearing the exact same hat. The theater-going couple also get the attention of accompanying drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook, Jr.), who makes eyes at the woman. As Scott walks the mysterious woman back to the bar where they met, she refuses to give him her name, saying that “It’s better this way.” When he returns home, he finds himself greeted by Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez), who is curious as to why Scott’s wife is dead in the next room. Scott admits that he and his wife argued that evening, their anniversary, and that he left to let off some steam. The only person who can confirm his alibi is the woman that he was with all night. Although his presence is confirmed at the bar by the bartender (Andrew Tombes) and his delivery to the theatre is collaborated by the cab driver, both of them—rather sweatily—proclaim that he was alone and that there was no woman with him, with or without an elaborate hat.
It’s here that the film switches gears and our true protagonist appears: Carol Richman (Ella Raines), Scott’s secretary, whom he has nicknamed “Kansas.” She knows he’s innocent, and when he’s convicted, she continues to try and find the “phantom lady” who can testify to Scott’s location. First she stakes herself out at Anselmo’s and gives the bartender the evil eye for nights on end before finally following him through the streets to confront him about why he lied about Scott being alone; when the bartender breaks free from the mitts of a group of men who intervene when he threatens Carol for following him, he winds up straight in front of an oncoming car and is killed. Things really come to a head when Carol, now assisted by a recalcitrant Inspector Burgess (who now realizes that a guilty man would never have hung onto the specific alibi that Scott did), poses as a “hep kitten” in order to go home with Cliff the drummer who, in a drunken state, admits that he was bribed to pretend he never saw Scott’s oddly-adorned companion. While Carol goes to summon Burgess, Cliff is confronted by the man who bribed him, who disposes of him before Burgess and Carol can return. The last hope is to try and get the truth from Estela Moneteiro, but the diva is so vain about her headwear that she had her own version of the hat destroyed upon seeing a copy in the audience and proclaims that she never saw the woman. But if they can find out who made the hat . . .
I’m not sure that I could name another single noir where the protagonist is a woman. Sure, there are always femmes fatale and ladies with gams that go all the way up to heaven, but it’s a rare surprise to see one leading the investigation, tracking down leads, and working tirelessly to prove the innocence of their love. That it takes so long for Carol to enter the picture is hardly worth mentioning, since the film moves at a breathless clip from the moment she appears until the film’s conclusion, and we move at a good pace since we’ve only got eighty-seven minutes to tell this tale. The only time that the film starts to feel a little slow is when Carol finally manages to track down the phantom lady, discovering that she’s named Ann Terry, and the woman is in a state of period-appropriate heartbroken mourning. Her fiance died mere days before they were to be married, and the night that she attended the theatre with Scott was apparently the only time she’s left her home since the incident. When Carol finds her, she’s only half there, behaving as if she’s been dosed with downers to keep her from hurting herself (which, given the state of medicine at the time, very well may have been the case). The conversation between the two is, then, naturally stilted, but watching Carol talk to Ann like she’s a child and only getting half answers is a bit frustrating to watch, and really throws a speed bump into the mix. The only thing that ensures that the film’s momentum continues is the knowledge that we in the audience have that the co-investigator who has joined her by this point is the murderer of the late Mrs. Henderson (and Cliff), and that keeps the suspense alive. Their final confrontation once she discovers the evidence is effectively tense, and I genuinely wasn’t sure that Carol was going to make it out alive.
Robert Siodmak directed this picture, one year before The Spiral Staircase and two before The Dark Mirror. He partnered on this one with producer Joan Harrison, a name I’m quite familiar with from seeing it in the opening credits of every episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as her screenplay credits on Foreign Correspondent, Rebecca, and Suspicion. A contemporary reviewer stated that “Miss Harrison is doing nothing that Hitchcock has not done a great deal better,” and although this film doesn’t hold a candle to the consensus classics that her longtime collaborator created, it’s quite comparable to a fair bit of it (and much better than some of his later works, or even some of his middle period clunkers). I’d like to think it’s Harrison’s involvement in this one that made it a woman-centered uniqueness, which transcends mere novelty. Of course, that same bent is likely the reason that we have the protracted sentimental scene between Ann and Carol, but that cost is well worth the reward of just how much more interesting this one is than a lot of other noirs of the period, many of which were cheap and disposable, putting it in the same category of excellent genre representatives that have withstood the test of time, like D.O.A. I’ve also found myself stumbling into a bit of a Siodmak retrospective this year, and he continues to impress. There’s visual flair here that sets this one apart from its contemporaries as well, as one would expect from a film that has an opening credit for “Phantom Hat design,” and there’s a fantastic sequence late in the film set in the apartment/studio of a sculptor, where ominous heads of various sizes oversee the events as they play out, which makes for a foreboding feeling. The sequence in which Carol poses as floozy “Jeannie” to catch the eye of Cliff and try to get more information from him includes a detour where he takes her to a cramped room that appears to be little more than a storage space where some of this other musician friends play frenzied jazz. The quick cutting of the film to match the energy of the music, combined with the isolation of the location and the buckets of sweat that everyone’s shedding, give us the sense that Carol is in real danger, even if the text contains no actual peril, just the general vibe of it.
Like Dark Mirror, where this one falls apart a little is in its fascination with the psychology of the killer. Burgess goes on a long-winded speech about “paranoiacs,” ironically delivered to the person that the audience is now aware is the killer, and how impossible it is for them to fit into normal society and how they’re perpetually distressed. All of this happens while the killer seems to be barely able to control his hands and then faints at the end of the conversation, yet Burgess takes no note of the obvious implication that the man feels guilty about something that Burgess has said (he does seem to be a little more paranoid about this after, but not enough to warn Carol to be careful directly). The murderer spends quite a lot of time with Burgess and Carol as part of the investigation, and while there’s a lot of fun to be had as they get closer and closer to the truth while he becomes less and less able to control his obvious anxiety, it also makes them look a little stupid. I would have bought the narrative that he simply killed Scott’s wife for the reasons that he eventually gives (that he flew into a rage when she admitted that, even though she was cheating on her husband with him, she had no intention of running off together) and that the rest of his killings were to cover his tracks. I haven’t been able to find specific information about what the original intended ending for the film was, but I have found a few offhand references to changes made to the climax because of the Hays Code, and it’s possible that this psychological focus was also a result of compliance with the Code’s mandates; maybe he was just a killer in the initial text and the rest was grafted on. It feels that way, but that doesn’t make this one any less enjoyable.
It’s a dark night in Quebec City. We move in, slowly, on one building in particular, gliding in through the window to find a man dead on a carpet. The beaded curtain that hangs over the door to the room is still moving, his killer having departed mere moments earlier. On the street, a man in a cassock emerges from the dead man’s house and moves up the street, slowly, until he enters Ste. Marie’s church. The killer, Otto Keller (O. E. Hasse), begs Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) to take his confession, and the young priest does so. Otto begins with an expression of his gratitude to Father Logan, who helped him and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas) find work and lodging in the rectory, before he admits that he accidentally killed local dirtbag lawyer Villette (Ovila Légaré), whom he initially only intended to rob so that Alma wouldn’t have to work so hard. Father Logan confirms that his confession is held in confidence and that he will not involve the law, but that Keller must return the money and turn himself in. The following morning, Father Logan makes his way to Villette’s house, where he meets primary investigator Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), who tells him that Otto discovered the body. Larrue observes Father Logan speaking to a woman outside and becomes suspicious, even though he doesn’t hear her say the words “Villette is dead? Then we’re saved!” to the priest. The woman turns out to be Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of local legislator Pierre Grandfort, who is close friends with Crown Prosecutor Willy Robertson (Brian Aherne), but her and Father Michael’s friendship goes back even further, and is deeper.
I Confess! gets off to a marvelous start, but then it ends up spinning its wheels for far too long, even for a film that clocks in at a mere 95 minutes. The story feels like it’s headed toward a conclusion at about the halfway mark, and by the time we reached the final third, I kept checking the time and finding myself startled to discover that only a minute or two had passed since I had last checked. The ending is sufficiently strong that the last twelve minutes were at least engaging, but it wasn’t enough to come back from the slump. Conceptually, it’s pure Hitchcock: the wrongfully accused man who must prove his innocence but for some reason cannot, the blonde who loves him, and a crew of police investigators who are at turns both foolish and malicious. As a narrative device, having a character who can’t defend himself against false allegations because he’s bound by the sanctity of the confessional is also a fresh idea, and complicating matters further by having the victim be a blackmailer extorting the priest’s ex-girlfriend in a way that potentially implicates the priest himself is a fun place to take that concept. Unfortunately, Clift is dreadfully dull in this role, Hasse’s turn as the villainous Keller is similarly underwhelming, and the apathy that Hitchcock allegedly had for this project comes through in the workmanlike nature of the cinematography.
When I told my mother that I had recently watched this one, she asked if it had been released before or after Montgomery Clift’s infamous car accident, noting that he might have been stiff because of the resulting physical and psychological scars (and the addictions that came in attempting to medicate the latter). That didn’t happen until 1956, and I Confess was released only a couple of years after A Place in the Sun, in which I seem to remember finding him very convincing. I don’t know where the blame for his stilted performance here comes from, and I can say the same thing about Hesse. Keller seems to reflect the era’s general antipathy to German immigrants, and taken as a sole piece of evidence in a vacuum, one would think that Hitchcock thought that all Germans who asked only for the opportunity to work and bemoaned their lot in life as “[men] without a country” were simply lying in wait for the opportunity to turn on their supposed benefactors, lie about their motives, steal, frame clergymen, and kill their own wives for trying to see justice done. He’s a factor in the plot, but he’s not a character, and the film is much worse off for letting us know who the manslaughterer is from the start but not making that person interesting. Baxter ends up the MVP here, and the best part of the film comes after Father Michael has been arrested and she decides she has to explain everything to the police at the cost of her social standing and dignity: years before, Michael went off to fight in the war and told Ruth not to wait for him; when he came back, she had already married Pierre. When their innocent reunion is interrupted by a thunderstorm, the two are forced to take shelter in a gazebo, where the blackmailer/victim discovered them the next morning and inferred they had slept together, which would be enough to ruin Ruth’s marriage, embroil her husband in a scandal, and (even though he wasn’t yet ordained) defrock Michael. When her testimony ends up doing more harm than good, as the hours she spent with Michael the night of the murder fall before the time of death but her explanation finally provides the police with a potential motive for Michael, she’s distraught, and Baxter sells it tremendously. It’s just not enough to save it.
The film almost does something interesting near its conclusion, when the jury finds that there simply isn’t enough evidence to convict Michael and he’s released. Although he’s not culpable in the eyes of the law, his verdict in the court of public opinion is much heavier, and it would have been interesting to spend a little more time with this narrative thread. Can he return to the church? How has his downfall affected the faith of his parishioners? Will some forgive but never forget? None of these questions get the chance to be answered, or even a moment’s breathing room, as Michael barely makes it down the steps before Mrs. Keller attempts to tell Larrue that her husband was the true killer, only for Keller himself to shoot her (so much for the whole motive of his theft being to spare her a life of servitude, I suppose). Oh well. A necessity really only for Hitchcock or Clift completists, I’d say skip this one.
There is something both inevitable and unfathomable about there being a new I Know What You Did Last Summer legacyquel in wide theatrical release right now. Sure, the combination of Hollywood executives’ unquenchable thirst for name-brand IP and the relative dependability of horror cheapies to turn a tidy profit makes it seem like a no-brainer that this vintage 90s title would get the modern rebootquel treatment. It was pretty low on the priority list too, following a long parade of legacy horror sequels of varying quality in recent years, like Scream,Halloween, Candyman, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Final Destination: Bloodlines. Even so, the I Know What You Did Last Summer brand had already been downgraded to straight-to-streaming schlock in its little seen third & fourth entries, so it’s a little surprising to see the title claw its way back onto multiplex marquees. It’s especially surprising when you consider how little there is to the property beyond the recognizability of its title, which makes for easy, memorable parody in Scary Movie-type yuck-em-ups. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film is a by-the-numbers teen slasher with little bloodshed and little novelty. Its setting in a North Carolina fishing village provides some nice background texture for its otherwise indisticntive murder spree, justifying its hook-handed fisherman killer’s costuming beyond its connection to a timeless urban legend. By the second film in the series, it was already apparent that those details weren’t enough to keep the party going, since I Still Know What You Did Last Summer immediately jumped the shark by sending its teens-in-peril on the kind of Bahamas beach trip that usually arrives multiple seasons into a hokey sitcom like Saved by the Bell. That tropical island locale does little to distract from the fact that the series’ killer isn’t iconic enough to have earned a recognizable moniker by his second outing. You can’t even joke about I Still Know being subtitled The Fisherman’s Tropical Vacay or The Hook Man’s Island Getaway because no one would know what you’re talking about. When the killer’s teenage victims refer to him as “The Slicker Guy” deep into the third act, you can feel the whole brand falling apart from under you . . . and yet here we are, two more sequels and a televised series later.
The benefit of contributing to a legacy this bland is that it sets expectations low. No army of black t-shirted horror bros are going to be outraged about the blasphemous desecration of I Know What You Did Last Summer as a sacred object, not the way they were with more disastrous franchise refreshers like The Exorcist: Believer or the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street. That gives director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson free rein to be playful & flippant with the material, even if the exercise requires her to be absurdly reverent to the fabled events of 1997. Through reluctant re-unions, nightmare visitations, and a presumptuous sequel set-up stinger, the main casts of the first two I Know What You Did features return here for unearned moments of horror-icon spotlight: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar and, briefly, Brandy. As is now legacyquel tradition, they help fill in a younger cast of imperiled teens on their initial bouts with the slicker killer, adding gravitas to previous outings by constantly referencing Trauma in therapy speak (in this case through classroom lecture and conversational references to The Body Keeps The Score). The 4th of July celebrations, fish-themed parade floats, department store mannequins, and town-hall beauty pageant stage of the original film are all treated with sacred reverence as if anyone would remember those details without having recently rewatched it as homework. Robinson undercuts that reverence with metatextual jokes about how “Nostalgia’s overrated” or how it’s not a viable plan to “fuck off to the Bahamas” to escape this particular killer, but those one-liners only go so far. Her bolder choice is to double down on the sassy, aggressive girliness of her straight-to-Netflix comedy thriller Do Revenge here, aiming her I Know What You Did sequel at teen-girl sensibilities instead of trying to please those teens’ aging Millennial parents. Considering that the first Last Summer movie excelled more as a teen melodrama than as a bodycount slasher anyway, it makes sense that this cutesy reboot would be rigorously engineered specifically “for the girlies and the gays.” What’s impressive is that it pulls off that girlish tone while still being the most violent entry in its series to date.
As with the original cast, the new I Know What You Did Last Summer crew is populated by young twentysomethings who are likely only famous to children (give or take whatever die-hard fans Chase Sui Wonders might have picked up from her turn as the least recognizable actor in Bodies Bodies Bodies). As with the original cast, they spend a reckless night partying on a public road by the fishing-village coast, leading to an anonymous stranger’s vehicular death. They do nothing to rescue or report in that moment of crisis, which seemingly leads to vengeance from beyond the grave the following summer, when a hook-handed killer in a fisherman slicker threatens them with notecards & puncture wounds. This reboot does not deviate from the narrative formula of the original, but it does deviate in tone & extremity. While the 1997 film kept most of its kills offscreen and cleanly preserved on fishing-boat ice, the new one leans into its R rating and throws in some additional fishing-themed tools of death to expand the killer’s arsenal: boning knife, anchor rope, harpoon gun, etc. Robinson also expands the horror-nostalgia scope to include allusions to other famous properties, borrowing the Jaws mayor’s refusal to postpone his town’s 4th of July celebrations, the Scream killer’s kitchen-island voyeurism, and some horror-nerd cred from references to podcasts like Colors of the Dark & This Ends at Prom. She balances out all of this genre-fan pandering by keeping the mood light, sassy, and gay. Same-sex couples, bisexual hookups, and a self-satisfied coining of the term “gentrifislaytion” align the film with other recent reclaimed-for-the-girlies horror titles like Do Revenge, Clown in a Cornfield, and 2021’s Slumber Party Massacre remake than traditionally macho horror-convention-bro fare. I don’t believe any of those titles are remarkably great films, but I also recognize that I am not their primary target audience. I was 12 years old when I watched the first I Know What You Did Last Summer in a suburban movie theater, duped into enjoying an afterschool-special melodrama about reckless driving because it was dressed up in the rain-soaked clothes of a post-Scream slasher. Today’s 12-year-olds now have a mediocre-to-everyone-else slasher of their very own here, just as lacking in distinct iconography but now doubly violent, fun, and queer-friendly. I think that’s beautiful.
I remember when the first reviews of Beau is Afraid were coming out, one of the earliest reports were of someone who stood up as the credits rolled and shouted, “I better not hear any fucking clapping!” I saw that movie by myself on a Saturday morning because I love a pre-noon matinee, but this time, I went to see Eddington with a group of friends. One friend left the theater for two extended periods of time, and I assumed that they weren’t feeling well until, standing outside after the 145-minute runtime had come to its conclusion, they expressed righteous indignation over the movie’s pace and momentum. Another friend stated that they also felt the film was overlong, especially its final act, and said he would rank it 3.5 stars. I was a little too tired to get into it that night, but I thought this one was great. It’s not as exceptional as Ari Aster’s previous work, but it’s just as confident and feels like a return to his more conceptually focused first couple of films.
The film opens in May of 2020, and we learn a lot about Eddington, New Mexico fairly quickly. As the town’s resident vagrant (an unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr.) approaches from the desert, we see that it’s not very large, maybe sixteen square blocks, and we learn later that a lot of what we do see is unoccupied. Just outside of town is the potential site for a new AI data center, the construction of which (and the accompanying “job creation”) are a center of the platform for Eddington mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is up for re-election. Garcia has followed gubernatorial guidelines for masking and social distancing, which has escalated what are likely long-term frictions between Garcia and Eddington’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), whose asthma makes him overly inclined to side with the “I can’t breathe with a mask” contingent. Cross’s home life is a nightmare; his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) has moved into the home he shares with his wife Louise (Emma Stone), a temporary situation that has become extended, and which is further exacerbated by Dawn’s ceaseless, breathless repetition of too-online conspiracy ideas and justifications. There’s a shrine to Dawn’s late husband and Louise’s father, Joe’s predecessor as sheriff, in their already-cramped house, and Louise is clearly starting to be affected by the omnipresence of Q-addled discourse being broadcast in her home 24/7. She also makes creepy, Tim Burton-esque dolls that she sells on Etsy, unaware that all of her sales are coming from people that Joe pays back. Garcia’s house is a little more peaceful, as he parents his son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) solo while also running the town and a local bar. Without thinking it through or talking it over with his wife, he declares his own candidacy for mayor in the upcoming election, and he sets out to dethrone Garcia.
This is not a stylish movie in the way that Beau or Midsommarwere. It’s grounded, and for some, it may be too grounded. My frustrated friend grew very bored very quickly of how much of the film was taken up with people looking at their phones, which I think means that the film effectively captured the perpetual boredom (intercut with moments of intense existential dread) that came from the unfettered screentime that characterized the time period in which it’s set. Like a lot of real life conflict, many find themselves unable to invest in a film in which there are no characters to sympathize with or root for. Garcia is more than willing to sell out Eddington’s future by ensuring that the town will be rendered uninhabitable within a few decades—optimistically—by allowing its resources to be consumed by the data center, over the objections of the only person living in town who voices any dissent about what the project will mean to the town’s future. Later scenes set in his home also reveal him to be one of those toilet paper hoarders, which is a clever bit of visual storytelling in that it shows us that, for all his outward appearances of being progressive and compassionate, he’s susceptible to (and buys into) the same base panicky animal instincts shared by others. It would have been perhaps too pat a narrative if this selfishness in combination with his carelessness about the community and its environmental needs was compared to his acquiescence to COVID mandates put in place for the common good, and to have that realization of his hypocrisy be the catalyst for Joe’s mayoral campaign. Of course, that would also cause us to lend too much sympathy to Joe, and it’s important that we never think too highly of him or consider that any actions he takes could be reasonable on any level. Joe has to be detestable despite any sympathy that we may have for him as a result of what he’s dealing with at home; it’s imperative that he have no real ideals or ideology because the moment we can trace his violent impulses and their fallout to an internal ethical construction, we run into the danger of potentially empathizing with him.
Every Aster protagonist prior to Joe is someone with whom we empathize, in part because their behavior stems from traumas that are completely external. In Hereditary, Toni Collette’s Annie has been driven to the point of madness by a lifetime of being gaslit by her cultist mother and the death of her daughter, so while her downfall is inevitable, it’s also relatable and understandable. In Midsommar, Florence Pugh’s Dani can come across as needy and difficult, but she’s dealing with the reality of her family’s tragic, horrifying death and the unspoken-but-not-unknown reality that her boyfriend is staying with her out of pity rather than compassion, duty rather than love. The title character in Beau is Afraid is impotent and pathetic, but his entire life is an endless nightmare constructed and architected by his mother in order to make him that way. Joe’s tragic flaw is entirely a matter of his pride. To the extent that his actions are affected by external circumstances, his acting out could be traced to the pandemic, but he’s not alone in dealing with that; literally everyone on Earth is dealing with the same problem. Beau’s world is designed to isolate and emotionally destroy him in a kind of actualization of the paranoid idea that “The world is out to get you,” while Joe is reacting to the events of very real time and place that we all experienced, but he (like many psychopathically individualistic people at that time) falls into the same paranoid trap. Beau was right; the world was out to get him. Joe, on the other hand, is very, very wrong. There’s not a single thing that Joe touches that isn’t worse for having come into contact with him, and every action that he takes results in making Eddington worse, less safe, and more fractured, and the events that spill out of Eddington into the rest of the world (notably the escalation of a Kyle Rittenhouse-esque figure to the national stage) also make everything worse. There’s no one to root for here, and that in combination with the laser-focus on a shaky, unsteady period of recent history makes for a movie that’s bound to alienate audiences despite its verisimilitude in comparison to the more surreal films in Aster’s C.V. I’ve loved all of his movies, but just as much as I wouldn’t blame someone for not enjoying Midsommar or Beau, I wouldn’t argue with someone who hated this movie because this is not a movie that’s meant to please. It’s doing something else.
Not to keep putting this movie in conversation with all of Aster’s other work, but each of his movies have been about people on the verge, dealing with madness that works its way out of them. In this film, the madness is in everyone. Louise is a particularly pitiable figure, trapped in a place that she hates and surrounded by reminders of the past. Her father was sheriff before Joe, and her mother’s reverence for him seems to be a point of contention, with implication that he was abusive and that this abuse left Louise open to manipulation by Q-esque radical Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak is a curious figure here, as he had little real effect on the plot or on Eddington. Dawn, deep into her conspiracy rabbit hole, takes Louise to one of Peak’s meetings, where his improbable tale of childhood trafficking (which bears all the markings of false memory syndrome, if Peak even believes what he’s saying at all and isn’t merely being used to generate a cult of personality around himself) moves Louise to abandon her family and join him. Narratively, he simply removes Louise from the story, but on a more holistic level, he epitomizes the kinds of dangerous grifters who can emerge from times of social upheaval, and a demonstration of just how far-reaching their influence can be due to the rise of social media and larger communication infrastructure. He’s there for the same reason that goofy Sarah, the wannabe social justice influencer is: because Eddington is trying (and mostly succeeding) to create a panoramic externalization of the general American circumstances of 2020. And it works! For me, at least.
Eight summers ago, I attended nearly every screening of the Alamo Drafthouse’s summer series in my favorite genre, “Women on the Verge.” Two of those films, An Unmarried Woman and Puzzle of a Downfall Child, were such instant favorites of mine that they ended up as Movies of the Month the following year. I missed a screening of the difficult-to-find Joan Didion adaptation Play It as It Lays and have spent the intervening years cursing myself for the loss of this opportunity and eagerly anticipating another chance to check it out. Maybe it’s all that self-hype that left me cold upon finally getting the opportunity, or maybe it’s really not that great of a film, but I was not as captivated by this one as I was by the films alongside which it was initially brought to my attention.
The film version of Play It as It Lays was directed by Frank Perry, who also helmed a couple of previous Movies of the Month, having directed 1968’s The Swimmer (a Brandon pick) and Britnee’s pick Hello Again (1987), and the film’s failures may have something to do with his vision, but not with his style. Play It as It Lays is a film that can charitably be described as incoherent, and while that incoherence is, as it was in the aforementioned Puzzle, a filmic tool used to demonstrate the internal life and fractured psyche of the film’s point of view character, it ends up making the film a bit too messy to fully understand. When reading the film’s summary on its Wikipedia page, the plot seems relatively straightforward, but it also seems like it’s relying on extratextual information (in this case, the plot of the novel on which it is based) to contextualize the narrative into something comprehensible; that’s cheating a bit, in my opinion.
Tuesday Weld plays Maria Lang (nee Wyeth), an actress in her early thirties who narrates the film while walking the gardens of the institution in which she currently resides. In the flashbacks, she describes her early life, in which her parents moved from Las Vegas to a former mining town in rural Nevada that her father had won via gambling, a tiny nothing with a population of 28 which, by the time of the present narrative, no longer exists. She fell in love with and married Carter Lang (Adam Roarke), a respected independent director who cast her in his first film; he’s described as “a cult director with an eye for commerce” by one of his peers, and by the time the film’s proper narrative begins in the flashback, he and Maria are separated. There’s some implication that their falling out revolved around the decision to institutionalize their young daughter Kate, whose behavioral issues are on display when Maria visits her boarding school and witnesses her attack another child, which appears to be habitual. Maria’s only real friend is B.Z. Mendenhall (Anthony Perkins), a film industry friend of her husband’s with a family history of suicide and mental illness. Even if he weren’t already predisposed toward depression, his life situation, which sees him forced into a beard marriage to Helene (Tammy Grimes) at the behest of his controlling mother Carlotta (Ruth Ford), would make him miserable. Maria, who hasn’t acted in a while after damaging her career by walking off of a set a few years earlier, is convinced that Carter is having an affair with his new actress muse, Susannah (Diana Ewing), and she pursues a few lovers of her own, including a long term fling with widowed actor Les Goodwin (Richard Anderson) that results in a pregnancy, a brief affair with mob lawyer Larry Kulik (Paul Lambert) that ends unceremoniously, and an afternoon hook-up with TV actor Johnny Waters (Tony Young) that highlights just how self-destructive her behavior has become.
Again, this all probably sounds fairly coherent, and not all that dissimilar from movies like Puzzle and other “Women on the Verge” pictures. Like those, where this does succeed most is in the strong performances from its leads. Maria isn’t inherently unlikable, but her generally nihilistic outlook makes it hard to root for her, since it’s all but impossible to imagine a better world or life for her; even her dream of living somewhere quiet and pastoral with Kate is clearly delusional. That Weld is able to imbue Maria with a sense of the personality-that-was when current Maria is disempowered and passive to the point of lethargy is a testament to the malleability of her talent, and when this film works it’s because she and Perkins make their characters feel like real, tangible people. Perkins’s B.Z. is an even more tragic figure than Maria, even if the film spends less time on his personal life. Of all of the men on screen, only B.Z. sees Maria for who she really is and the situation in which she finds herself because their dual alienation makes them kindred spirits. For Carter, Maria is a burden; for Kulik she’s just some good-looking company while he spreads money around Las Vegas; for Goodwin she’s the stand-in for the wife who committed suicide; for Johnny Waters she’s just a receptacle for his expression of sexual egotism. B.Z.’s relationship with her could be seen as just as selfish, as he sees her as a mirror for his own demons, but that projection isn’t incorrect and they really are birds of a feather. When he finally decides to end his life, as his father and grandfather did before him, he offers Maria the chance to follow him into the dark, holding out the pills he intends to consume to share with her, and although she declines, she holds his hand as he slips away. This the final straw that ends with her being institutionalized by Helene and Carter, but it’s also the purest expression of love that any two people show each other here.
I have little love for the late film critic John Simon (to quote Roger Ebert, “I feel repugnance for [him]”), but he wasn’t wrong when he called Play It “a very bad movie.” Ebert himself gave the film his highest possible rating, but even he criticized the film’s material as thin in comparison to its smart direction and entrancing performances. That seems to be the consistent criticism of the film in reviews that I have found: praise for Weld and Perkins as performers and Perry for his directorial eye, with failures across every other metric. I won’t be breaking free of that paradigm, personally, since I feel the same way. This one might pair well with any of other films mentioned above as a foil or a conversation piece, but its narrative scaffolding wouldn’t hold up to a breeze, and it won’t stand up on its own.
Swampflix 