Sunday Song: Listening Closer to Jon Batiste and Allison Russell
Interviewed for TIME about his exhilarating, joyous new album We Are, Stephen Colbert's late-night band leader Jon Batiste says, "Stevie [Wonder], I remember him telling me once, ‘Don’t let anybody take your joy away.’ And that really resonated with me. And just in general, the whole aspect of your music being no more or no less than you are as a human being."
Batiste has been a passionate participant in Black Lives Matter protests. Unreliable but popular news sources have consistently painted the protests as violent and reckless, emphasizing images of fires and vandalism, often out of context, and occasionally started by troublemakers who seek to make the protests look violent). Those willing to support (or at least live with) America's traditions of neglect, abuse, and white supremacy have persuaded many Americans (typically, those who are eager to dismiss Black Lives Matter movement as a problem) that the protests are mob-mentality riots, effectively distracting us from evidence of systemic racism. But the truth is that these public appeals for justice have been, for the most part, peaceful and profound. They sound an alarm that the very "liberty and justice" dominating America's propaganda is false advertising — the abuses of slavery have not been erased; they've been reinvented in ways white Americans can easily overlook.
This song highlights the protests as an affirmation of dignity and, even better, a transcendence of the idiocy of America's white supremacist leadership.
He may have won an Oscar this year for bringing the music to the magic of Pixar's Soul, but I'm more excited about this record.
For "WE ARE," Batiste called up his St. Augustine High School Marching 100 marching band and a children's gospel choir from New Orleans for backup. Regarding the marching band, he says, “From its inception in 1951, [St. Augustine High School] was intended for the education of young Black men during a time when there was not an elite institution of its kind for high school students. The marching band is historic and a first of its kind as well, rivalling [sic] college level bands. This school has been a cornerstone in the community for decades.”
At Relix, he says that the song
captures the three prongs that are the basis of the album: the times that we’re in today, the heritage that all the music comes from and my personal narrative. It captures them both narratively and sonically. It’s a real multi-generational narrative ... based sort of casting with my grandfather on the track, giving a sermon. The marching band on the track is my high-school marching band, which is also a school that a lot of my family went to before I was there. It’s a historically Black high school in New Orleans that produces a lot of very active alumni. My nephews, who are 5 and 11, are on the track as well. It’s kind of a disco meets marching band music meets gospel track that speaks to the scope of what I wanted to achieve in the album, which is the synthesis of narratives and the synthesis of different styles of music.
https://youtu.be/MkpvNaBe0mg
Want to hear more about this amazing track? Here's an episode of Song Exploder all about it.
The vocalist for the band Birds of Chicago, Allison Russell will be one of many first-rate acts performing at Over the Rhine's Nowhere Farm festival in October (which Anne and I will be attending to celebrate our 25th anniversary).
Russell's new album Outside Child is one of the very best I've heard so far in 2021. I've enjoyed Birds of Chicago, but now I cannot wait to hear her live.
This isn't my favorite track on the record, but until that one becomes available via YouTube, I'll share this one, which is a knockout on its own. Read about its inspiration in this NPR Music spotlight by Jewly Hight:
https://youtu.be/HNIzvBf6VKA
Overstreet Archives: The Clearing (2004)
As part of a housecleaning inventory, I'm restoring some ancient reviews to the site. My review of The Clearing was originally published at Christianity Today in July 2004.
Looking back, I must have been right about some things, because I haven't heard anybody talk about this movie is more than a decade. If you're one of its defenders, step up and persuade me to give it a second look!
The Clearing starts out like a thriller, but it is far from thrilling.
Pieter Jan Brugge’s directorial debut is watchable only for its talented cast, a trio of formidable actors who make you wonder what drew them to this particular script. It’s a kidnapping yarn that raises a lot of interesting questions and suggests myriad possibilities for conspiracy and surprise, only to cast off those concerns entirely. It ends by slumping into the territory of simple morality plays — you know the kind, where the captive rich man suddenly learns that a few of his priorities are out of whack.
Brugge, who served as producer for Michael Mann’s edgy thrillers The Insider and Heat, deals with some heavy ethical concerns here, and he’s got a lineup of seasoned actors who make the most of uncomfortable silences and emotional outbursts. But the script by newcomer Justin Haythe feels like a rough draft. The characters lack distinctive voices, fitting the typical clichés of the rich businessman (Robert Redford), the businessman’s imperious wife (Helen Mirren), and the grudge-bearing ex-employee (Willem Dafoe).
It is difficult to discuss the plot without “spoiling” what few pedestrian “surprises” it bears — but here is a restrained summary: Wealthy car-rental-business pioneer Wayne Hayes is kidnapped from the driveway of his suburban Pittsburgh home by an amateur criminal named Arnold, leaving his resourceful homemaker wife Eileen to fret over the crisis. The grown children (Alessandro Nivolo and Melissa Sagemiller) come home to furrow their brows over the scarcity of clues, and an FBI agent (Mike Pniewski) moves in to enjoy Eileen’s hospitality and muse over the identity of the kidnapper. Meanwhile, Wayne is forced to trudge hand-cuffed through rugged, rainy, forested terrain with his captor’s gun aimed at his spine. Arnold tells him there’s a cabin ahead, and that he’ll be handed over to a band of crooks who have hired him for the delivery.
The revelation that the dour, disgruntled Arnold once worked for Wayne comes early, so that’s hardly a spoiler. The biggest surprise is just how many interesting directions the storyteller refuses to go with his plot, preferring a simple and, frankly, dull series of conversations that lead to a rather bewildering outcome. Haythe’s idea of an exciting outburst runs like this: “I listened to you, goddamn it! Now you listen to me!”
By its conclusion, it has morphed from uninspired thriller into ponderous drama, but the dialogue-heavy scenes both in the woods and on the home front are plodding and even wearying. It would be a complete waste of time if the actors did not bring some intriguing subtleties to their roles. But as it is, even Mirren’s magisterial gravitas, Redford’s slow-burn intensity, and the unnerving complexities of Dafoe cannot get a fire going in this cliché-soggy kindling.
This kind of sub-level drama is the sort of thing that works in the hands of a subversive master like Roman Polanski. He did just that with a simple kidnapping plot called Frantic, the 1988 Harrison Ford mystery in which a husband goes hunting for his kidnapped wife. After stumbling into a dark and wicked Paris underworld, Ford’s character emerged a changed man, and thus what might have been a happy ending was instead marked by a discomforting chill.
Brugge doesn’t come anywhere close to such intriguing explorations. He teases us with typical thriller conventions — like the photographs of an innocent who doesn’t know she’s being watched, the wife’s discovery of her husband’s secret life, and the package from the kidnapper that holds a nasty surprise. There’s a burst of adrenalin late in the film when Eileen takes matters into her own hands, plunging into darkness to save her spouse. But these too lead to anticlimactic ends. You keep wishing Helen Mirren would transform into her Prime Suspect character, Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennyson, track down the villain and disintegrate him with her famously contemptuous scowl.
The film’s only real cleverness comes through a style that confounds our sense of chronology until the conclusion. While days are passing at the tormented family’s home, the villain and his victim seem to be running to a different wristwatch. Thus, as the FBI relate the clues they’ve discovered and the messages they’ve received, we’re kept uncertain of Wayne’s fate, even though we find him in the very next scene trudging forward through the trees, healthy but haggard. This mildly interesting device is, in the end, just a gimmick, not part of any meaningful aesthetic. In fact, the film has little to suggest at all, beyond “Love your wife” and “Wealthy people can be hard-hearted and ignorant.”
The enigmatic smile that closes the film might have been a cynical twist, a last-minute revelation, or something deeply meaningful. Instead, it’s just one last moment of “Huh?” in a film that, while unconventional, remains lost in dark and dreary woods.
Persuade Me: Should I see A Quiet Place Part II... or not?
I'm working 50–60 hour weeks these days in my teaching, grading, Zoom sessioning, faculty meeting attendance, and more. I have very little time for movies.
So I am being very selective about what I take the time to watch. Since I wasn't very fond of A Quiet Place — I never reviewed it, so here are my first-impression notes at Letterboxd — I'm not feeling motivated to go see A Quiet Place Part II.
Krasinski’s shrewd less-is-more approach to suspense and tension, and his penchant for crafting gripping set pieces and dreadful dilemmas around well-established rules, have, if anything, grown since the first film.
...
If there’s no one moment at once quite so agonizing and utterly simple as that indelible sequence in the first film with the nail, Part II makes appallingly effective use of something much softer. In one white-knuckle sequence after another, Krasinski shows that he understands that while the CGI beasties may drive the horror, what makes it tangible is what is mundane and concrete.
He adds, however, that it "winds up doing not quite as much with rather more...."
Not quite as much? I was dissatisfied with the first one for doing, well... not much.
Checking the account of Josh Matthews — a friend from The Glen Workshop and a reviewer I follow on Letterboxd — I find him confirming the things I feared I would find in the film:
It does not advance anything about the characters or world from Quiet Place 1. Everything from the original movie is repeated several times: more babies in peril; more metal mangling feet; more monsters who conveniently are as slow or as fast as the film needs them to be.
There is a big fat Zero character development. When I got home from this, my wife asked me if the Emily Blount [sic] character got married. Her point being, did she change, grow, develop, find new relationships, etc.?
And I had to respond, no, she pretty much did exactly the same thing as the first movie.
And he concludes that you might be entertained, but only if "you turn your brain off" for the duration.
Ugh.
Josh Larsen's opening line at Larsen on Film does not encourage me either:
If A Quiet Place was, in part, an ode to farm-to-table masculinity, A Quiet Place Part II doubles down on that ethos. The movie is mostly about its homegrown characters learning to “man up.”
He eventually concludes:
On the surface, A Quiet Place Part II is another expertly crafted and well-acted monster movie, much like its predecessor. ... I only wish A Quiet Place Part II was more interested in interrogating its take on masculinity.
If there's anything I'm no longer interested in spending my moviegoing time on, it's a version of traditional "man-up" masculinity that goes unexamined. Day by day, it becomes clearer that toxic masculinity is one of the root causes of so many things threatening to kill off the good that remains in the world.
Part II is standard sequel stuff.
After his detailed description of an unremarkable film, he describes how his complaints "evaporated the second my gaze drifted up and saw a band of light beaming over the audience and onto a screen 10 times the size of my TV." Ah, so... the joy of returning to theaters was enough for him, and also for the audience: "A few people applauded when the movie was over, and the rest seemed pleased. They were happy to be back."
That's not good enough for me. I've been going to theaters for several weeks now. If I'm going to invest time in movies, I want to see movies that remind me of why I love cinema. And while I love the way films bring people together, it's about more than being in a big, crowded room.
You're invited to try to change my mind... or to tell me I'm making the best decision by waiting around for something better.
I'll share any comments I receive that I find useful... one way or the other. (That means they need to be civil and detailed.)
Overstreet Archives: The Station Agent (2016)
Movies are coming back to theaters — thank the Maker! — and one of the most arresting trailers for big, serious-minded American movies comes from Oscar-winning filmmaker Tom McCarthy. Starring Matt Damon as an oil-rig worker trying to help his daughter who has been imprisoned on charges of murder in Marseille, Stillwater looks to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller.
https://youtu.be/9cq1lPPeMUY
I'm intrigued. But I'm missing the smaller, quieter films that made McCarthy one of my favorite American filmmakers. The Station Agent remains the DVD in my home library that I loan out the most.
So I figure it's a good time to revisit a piece I wrote about the film five years ago, a review I've never posted here at Looking Closer. In 2016, I wrote about The Station Agent for a special installment of my Christianity Today series called "Viewer Discussion Advised." I called it "88 Minutes of Film That Could Save a Life."
You try walking across Seattle alone. At night. Barefoot.
My college roommate did all the time. I didn't understand it, just as I didn’t understand his quiet demeanor, his watchfulness from the edges, or his aversion to typical college-life distractions. His after-dark disappearances intrigued me. So I took to walking with him. I wore hiking boots, and still I struggled to match his incredible stride. As I did, my own pace—in walking and in living—permanently changed. I came to value the rewards of adventures off the beaten path, of being quiet in good company. And I found a compassionate friend.
I think of Michael when I watch Tom McCarthy’s large-hearted 2003 comedy The Station Agent.
And I watch it frequently. I see myself in Joe: the talkative food-truck barista (Bobby Cannavale) who sets up shop next to an obsolete train depot in Middle-of-Nowhere, New Jersey. I think of Michael when I watch Fin (Peter Dinklage): a soft-spoken loner who moves into that depot for the solitude, and who eventually surrenders, accepting Joe’s gregarious, uninvited companionship.
It’s remarkable: Watch how Joe and Fin, like an oversized puppy playing with Grumpy Cat, become complementary. Watch how they transform one other through the simple, shared experience of long walks and short silences.
How might the world be changed if we went strolling, in quiet attentiveness, with those we would rather avoid?
My comparison of my roommate and Fin only goes so far. I don’t know where Michael’s quiet nature came from, but it’s obvious what made Fin so disinclined to talk with anybody: He’s been mocked, abused, and avoided for his dwarfism. He has every reason to withdraw from society, to forget himself in a solitary pursuit—namely, train watching. (Does he love trains because they spend so much time in unpopulated regions of the map?) I cringe, seeing myself in the way some people avoid Fin, someone they don’t understand. I hope I’m not so insensitive as those who stare, who mock, who take snapshots as if he’s a rare animal who escaped the circus.
But I also cringe at Joe’s irrepressible flamboyance, the way he imposes himself on Fin’s silent retreat; the way his vocabulary knows no filter (he’s the movie’s R-rated element); the way he insists on saying grace over a meal in company that would rather not. And yet, as I observe Joe’s pain over his own personal affliction—a family crisis—I find his weaknesses endearing.
How might the world be changed if we went strolling, in quiet attentiveness, with those we would rather avoid?
These two eccentrics aren’t alone: There’s also Olivia (Patricia Clarkson, at her best) an artist who drives the way she behaves, careening all over the place, and who walks like she’s wearing high heels through an earthquake. Olivia relies on prescription medication to cope with a harrowing loss. Olivia needs Joe and Fin. The local librarian, Emily (Michelle Williams), needs friends too, if she’s going to escape her boyfriend’s cruelty. And Cleo (Raven Goodwin)—it’s not hard to guess why this little girl plays all by herself down beside the railroad.
One by one, five suffering souls are drawn together by a magnetic need for wholeness that can be found in a makeshift family.
I don’t know if my roommate was lonely. In a way, Michael was like Joe — he knew himself, and he did what he loved, regardless of others’ reactions. But in other ways, he was like Fin, who, being slow to speak, quick to observe, and committed to walking, drew me — and eventually others — off the beaten path to discover worlds the rest of us overlook.
This, my favorite film from director Tom McCarthy (who made the Oscar-winning Spotlight), is the film I’d nominate as my favorite “love your neighbor” story. It’s the DVD in my home film library that I loan out the most. It makes me want to take Joe-sized risks, to introduce myself to (and say grace with) total strangers, to be a friend to someone on the edges of things, not out of charity, but out of curiosity. I might find hurt and I might find a blessing. Sometimes, they’re the same thing.
I recommend The Station Agent for moviegoers ages 17 and up. It is currently available on DVD and on various streaming platforms, including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, and Vudu.
Questions to Discuss and Consider:
1. At the opening of the movie, we meet Fin and Henry. Theirs is an unusual friendship. Why do you think they understand one another?
2. Fin works at The Golden Spike, a model-train hobby shop, next to a salon called “Scissorhands Salon.” The salon has a bright red awning, like it wants our attention. Might this be a deliberate allusion to another film? Is there any thematic similarity between Fin’s experience of life and that of Edward Scissorhands?
3. Fin. Joe. Olivia. Cleo. How do they complement one another? What is it about their personalities that makes the time they spend together a life-changing development?
4. Trace the evolution of Joe’s curiosity about train-watching. What does he think of it at first? What does he think of it later? How and why does this change occur?
5. How does Fin change over the course of his developing relationships?
6. Talk about the centrality of trains and railroads in this film, and Fin’s preoccupation with the role of trains in American history. What does this have to do with his own life and experience? Why do they appeal to him?
7. Who do you know that draws you out of your routines and expands your world? When was the last time you spent some time with them?
8. How is the time that Joe, Fin, and Oliva spend together different from “community outreach” efforts and the tactics of typical evangelism? How do they gain one another’s trust? How do they reach a point where they are ready to listen to one another and help each other through hard times?
9. When was the last time you invited someone you don’t know very well to join you for a sightseeing walk? Who might you call up today and get to know better?
10. Have you noticed anyone — at work, at church, in the neighborhood — who seems disconnected or friendless? What might happen if you introduced yourself? (Before you presume that you can change their lives, get ready — they just might change yours.)
Overlooked by Overstreet: Get Shorty (1995)
1995 was a feast for moviegoers. MIchael Mann's Heat was setting an epic new standard for cops-and-robbers films. George Miller was setting a new gold standard for big-screen children's stories with Babe. Pixar's Toy Story launched an unprecedented run of feature animation excellence that would eventually become a Disney revolution. Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility became an instant classic of literary adaptation. Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise began an ambitious trilogy par excellence. Visionaries like Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man), Todd Haynes (Safe), and David Fincher (Seven) were doing groundbreaking work.
I had just graduated from college, I was living on my own for the first time, I was working full-time for the City of Seattle's Department of Construction and Land Use. The ripple effects of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction were still obvious in new releases like The Usual Suspects and the third Die Hard film — even influencing Scorsese's Casino in some ways. But few imitators were as deliberate in their Pulp Fiction adoration as Barry Sonnenfeld's 1995 smash Get Shorty.
As Anne and I browsed our home library this week for something high-spirited and funny, she took an interest in revisiting Get Shorty. I hadn't seen it in at least 20 years, and I couldn't remember much about it... until I pressed 'Play." It all came back to me so quickly and vividly that I could recite some of the lines along with the stars. I must have seen this several times in '95. And yet I can't find any evidence that I ever reviewed it. So, 26 years later, here are some thoughts.
Entertaining and frivolous, Get Shorty isn't much more than a slick, smooth-riding vehicle large enough to carry a bunch of movie stars doing movie-starrish things in their prime. To borrow a phrase from the movie itself... it's "the Cadillac of minivans."
This is probably the best romp of the Tarantino-Lite genre that blew up after Pulp Fiction, even though it owes just as much to George Gallo's Midnight Run (particularly in its sending of Dennis Farina to the airport in the climactic moments). And it pales in comparison to both films in one significant way: where Tarantino and Gallo know how to make music of profanity, here the abundant f-bombs just stuff the screenplay like styrofoam packing peanuts.
For all of the giddy pleasures of Sonnenfeld's playful cinematography — he's a director who seems perpetually starstruck in the presence of celebrities no matter what movie he's making — there is too much of an 'ick'-factor here for this to ever feel like guilt-free fun. (Note now the young Columbian character Yayo and the prominent Black pimp-costumed drug dealer are the two be shot to death for laughs; how the film's primary villain is such a "likable goofball," but we still have to watch him give a particularly cruel beating to a vulnerable woman so we know he's the guy we should really be rooting against in this amoral morass; and then how our charismatic hero makes a point of expressing his disinterest in working on a movie with a "colored" lead. In 2021, these things ring out as worryingly dissonant in the film's prevailing context of casual white-boy cool.)
Like Palmer himself, this movie is too in love with Hollywood to be memorably subversive. We'll have to revisit Altman's The Player if we want a send-up of studio shenanigans that stings.
The Truffle Hunters (2021)
I am not what they call "a foodie." If I was, I might have known what an Alba truffle was before seeing a movie about where they grow, how they're found, and who finds them.
I'd venture to guess, though, that this confession will also reveal something about my economic status. As The Truffle Hunters reveals, Alba truffles are rare wonders that are sold at high prices and, if they're big enough, auctioned off for a fortune, simply so they can be shaved delicately over plates of gourmet cuisine. I'm a teacher who isn't paid enough to live in the city he teaches in, so... no wonder I've never heard of the Alba truffle before!
While I still don't know what truffles taste like, I now know what it's like to dig for them, how heavily this industry depends on the sophisticated snouts of certain dogs, and how deadly this discipline can be for those same dogs. And the movie is exhilarating whenever we're given, via GoPro cameras, the point of view of the bounding, barking dogs as they scanning currents of air for Alba truffle signals.
In her Washington Post review, Ann Hornaday compares The Truffle Hunters to 2019's Honeyland, a documentary that I found enthralling for how it invited us into the lives of one extraordinary beekeeper and the elderly mother she devotedly served. Jordan Raup at The Film Stage makes the same comparison, and he raves about the hunters as having "so much personality, joy, and life in them."
While I can see some basic similarities between the two films, I think there are substantial differences in matters that really count — and that's why The Truffle Hunters isn't likely to end up on my annual top ten list like Honeyland did. Sure, this movie reveals a similarly remote and unfamiliar world, one that sometimes seems timeless and enchanted. But Honeyland found a compelling narrative, and we became invested in the survival and success of its remarkable beekeeper and her ancient, suffering mother. By contrast, these hunters, while entertaining at first in their eccentricity, ultimately remain stubbornly and annoyingly opaque. Their pasts are uninvestigated. Their lives beyond the hunt are enigmatic. And the single-mindedness of their obsession — well, I found it more exasperating than amusing.
One spends most of his down time ignoring his wife's relentless — and well-founded — complaints and concerns. One talks to and feeds treats to his dog obsessively. One thrashes at a drum set in the great outdoors — for therapy, it seems. One has given up truffle hunting in disillusionment over the corruption of the industry and the violations of personal and professional boundaries, and now he spends his time furiously typing rants about his gripes with culture in general — including, of all things, the lost art of... undressing women? The film comes a little too close to making caricatures of each one, as if they might find fuller lives in a Christopher Guest mockumentary (which, I admit, I would watch). I don't want to go so far as to say the filmmakers are being patronizing (but that's exactly the term used by Simon Abrams at RogerEbert.com). Perhaps they went hunting for treasure in this promising context and this was the best they could come up with. But I can't help but imagine what we might have learned about them, or how we might have loved them, had someone with the curiosity of Agnes Varda been behind the camera.
What's more, I was surprised at the lack of subtext as the film unfolded. This subject matter is glowing with poetic promise. All of the pieces for a meaningful portrait of a corrupt industry are here: The wealthy who spend fortunes to taste rare fungi dug up by dogs from the earth. The judges who have devoted their lives to a particular delicacy and have noses — literally — for the good stuff. The go-betweens, agents who find the talented hunters and apply just enough pressure to get the best of them without burning them out. The hunters themselves who take pride in what they do well, but who really depend on their talented dogs for finding their best discoveries. And the dogs, born with good noses, eager to make their masters happy, and asking so very little in return. It all volunteers to be read as representative of any artistic adventure being spoiled by the cruelty of competitive commerce. It could have been a documentary equivalent of my favorite television series of the last decade: Detectorists. Who could ask for a better metaphor, the vocabulary of truffle-hunting as a way expressing humankind's common search for the sublime?
And, to their credit, the filmmakers seem to be somewhat curious about the great divide between the wealthy dealers of prize truffles, men in suits who live in apparent luxury, and the troubles of the men who are pressured into digging up more and more to the point that they become trespassers. (Worse, their determination turns others into dog-poisoners.) There's something of a commentary on exploitation here; it's just not particularly detailed or enlightening. And I can't escape a vague discomfort, as if there might be a touch of exploitation in the filmmaking as well.
Anyway, The Truffle Hunters offers a pleasant 84 minutes in the woods with some good dogs. And now I know what a dog sees when, wet with rain and mud, it shakes itself off.
Together Together (2021)
Earlier this week, I savored two hours in a surprisingly crowded movie theater. So far in 2021, the theaters I've visited have been almost empty, but now it looks like vaccinated moviegoers are returning to theaters! And they weren't there for a big noisy blockbuster — they had come for an indie comedy: Nikole Beckwith's new film Together Together.
The film follows 26-year-old Anna — played so winningly by a jittery Patti Harrison that I'm hoping to see more of her — on a journey of surrogate motherhood for a 40-something divorcee. His name is Matt and, played by Ed Helms in an endearingly squishy turn, he's a bit of a control freak... perhaps a hint as to why he's alone. What begins as an awkward contract develops into an unexpectedly intimate relationship, and (thank goodness!) not the sort you might expect. As Matt hovers and frets and obsesses about the baby within this attractive stranger's womb, and as Anna struggles to draw healthy boundaries for their relationship, we see a friendship bloom quite unlike anything we've seen in a movie before.
Matt is a character with an alarming lack of boundaries for at least half of the movie, and Helms makes that lack of social grace uncomfortable in a way that will remind many of us of his character on The Office. (Matt is, at times, just a bit too sit-commy in his obliviousness.) But Helms finds enough depth in Matt's longing to be a father to make his weaknesses ultimately endearing. I just wish I understood the character more. He avoids answering a lot of questions about his past, and he remains something of an enigma to me.
Anna makes a little more sense to me, and the nuances of Harrison's performance makes her the more fascinating subject, especially when more is demanded of her in the final act. Unfortunately, a few of the supporting characters around her lean, again, into sit-commy territory — particularly the mopey barista named Jules (Julio Torres) who seems to exist on another planet. It wouldn't have hurt to hear more from Tig Notaro as the platonic couple's counselor; she finds the right balance of funny but understated.
But despite the film's stumbles, here's something I'll remember about it: About 30 minutes into the film (if I recall correctly), I was startled by a conversation between Matt and Anna about, of all things, Woody Allen's perverse obsession with much younger women.
The timing was uncanny. I had only just wrapped up a classroom conversation with my film students about Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors — in which the most intimate relationship between a male and a female occurs between Allen's own 50-something character and a pre-teen girl. The classroom audience seemed predictably conflicted. They found Allen's Oscar-winning comedy engaging, challenging, and upsetting. They were particularly troubled as they learned about Allen himself, the apparently predatory tendencies that are evident in his own storytelling, and the evidence of his abusive tendencies currently spotlighted in the HBO series Allen vs. Farrow. But the students ended up divided on whether or not we should go on spending time with his films. Some argued that we should not honor him with our attention, much less any dollars required to access his work. Others seemed to think that the work has a lasting value, and that the rewards of considering it and discussing it outweigh any negligible "honor" or dollars that might end up in Allen's pocket.
So you can imagine my surprise, watching Together Together, to hear Anna's swift and merciless judgment of Allen's filmography as unacceptably perverse. At RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz counts this among the film's biggest mistakes, calling it "a pointless detour into subtext-as-text" and "the worst thing in the movie by a wide margin because it's inorganic and discursive—a withering critical monologue that should've been saved for the PR tour." I agree that the scene is a bit on-the-nose. But when it arrived, I experienced a sudden rush of relief. Why relief? If Together Together was going to confront head-on the dangers of such substantial age gaps in romantic relationships, that meant I could relax about where Beckwith was taking Matt and Anna. They weren't going to end up together together in that way. (If that had happened, it would have felt like a misguided kind of crowd-pleasing aimed at viewers with the poorest judgment.)
Fortunately, Beckwith has much more interesting possibilities in mind, and that's the saving grace of this film. The conversations between these two are edgy and discomforting enough to keep things interesting, and if you stick with them you will come away with an expanded map of the kinds of stories that are possible at the movies. It's amusing to watch critics wrestling with how to describe what Matt and Anna are experiencing. Seitz says, "[I]t feels wrong to call them 'a couple.' They're more than friends, less than lovers. Well, not 'less than,' because that phrase implies that a romantic relationship is greater than friendship. Then again, is this even a friendship?" I like the way Vox's Alissa Wilkinson puts it: This film "challenges how we imagine supportive relationships, the boundaries of friendships, and the many shapes love can take."
How many shapes has love taken in my friendships over half a century? All but a few of my relationships have been platonic, and nearly 25 years into my marriage, many of my closest friendships today are with women — friendships that feel like what I might have known if I'd grown up with sisters. Why are relationships like these such a rarity onscreen? I suspect it's because of storytellers' tendencies — and, let's face it, studio's tendencies — to want to catch and hold the audience's attention, and there are few lures more enticing than sex. But imagine how we might cultivate a healthier culture if meaningful, non-amorous relationships were depicted more frequently, and the rewards of such realities more recognizable? (Perhaps some would be freed from ideas as fear-based — and as harmful — as Mike Pence's beloved "Billy Graham rule"?)
While I'm not urging you to see Together Together on a big screen — it isn't particularly cinematic, and would play just fine on a small screen — the chemistry between Harrison and Helms warms into a meaningful — even inspiring — relationship, and that's enough to make it worth your time.
I love it when screenwriters cultivate characters and relationships so unique that I can't think of relevant comparisons from other films. Tom McCarthy did that with the friendship between the three leads in The Station Agent. Mackenzie Crook did that in his TV series Detectorists. Beckwith's characters may not come to life for me as fully as McCarthy or Crook's characters do, but her story held my attention to the end because I really had no idea how it was going to end up. Perhaps the best compliment I can give the film is that the cut to the end credits seemed abrupt, and I was immediately disappointed, wishing to go a little farther with both Ed and Anna, just to learn a little more about how things would play out from there. I suspect the sudden conclusion will end up being a productive disappointment; I'll keep thinking about what might be next for Matt and Anna for a long time to come.
The Courier (2021)
Our screens are so over-saturated with superheroes these days that we're in danger of forgetting what real heroes look like. Superpowers are exciting — but they're also shortcuts. They show us what we might dream of becoming. But let me put it this way: I lost interest in Captain America as soon as Steve Rogers got Stay-Puffed on steroids... that is to say, before he became Captain America. Anyway, the point: It takes so much more courage to put your life at risk for the Greater Good when you have the same limitations as everybody else.
Such people do exist, though. I'll make a pitch for one a little later, one who has been punished for bravery. But first, I want to draw your attention to a movie. I've just seen a feature film that, much to my surprise, doesn't exaggerate or embellish what's required for the role of hero, nor does it exaggerate the likely costs of courage. Even more impressive, the astonishing story it tells is true.
It's been several years since our last big-screen lesson on the Cuban Missile Crisis, so here comes The Courier to squeeze another suspenseful drama out of what was perhaps the most terrifying moment in American history, and easily one of the most dangerous for the planet. The film follows salesman Greville Wynne — his name is so perfect that it's hard to believe it wasn't invented by John Le Carré — as he is recruited by MI6 and the CIA to become the titular errand boy, dodging the KGB and smuggling intelligence from Moscow to London in the days before the Internet offered easier options.
Played by Benedict Cumberbatch with a dumbfounded "I'm a salesman, not a spy!" case of nerves, Wynne is utterly forgettable. And that's why he's the Chosen One. The hopes of America and the West against Russian aggression rest on somebody moving back and forth across borders without being noticed. This is a case of what's-good-for-espionage being what's-difficult-for-entertainment. And it's to Cumberbatch's credit that he sticks to this rule and avoids big Oscar-clip moments almost entirely. (Things take a brutal turn in the third act that requires the kind of extreme emotion that contest campaigns are built on.)
By contrast, the man he's sent to meet is made of stronger stuff: Soviet officer Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) has decided to gamble everything — his future, his family, his life — on his conscience, which tells him that he had better act fast and save the world from a nuclear holocaust.
This is where The Courier most resembles another Oscar-baiting spy movie: Spielberg's was engaging, driven by two memorable performances — although the reliable headliner Tom Hanks surrendered the movie to an outstanding turn from Mark Rylance. Similarly here, while Cumberbatch's role is more demanding and more dramatic, it's Ninidze who makes the strongest impression, the burden of his life-and-death gamble increasing until he looks like he might crumble. The movie is better when he's onscreen.
Bridge of Spies was the more satisfying film — and with Spielberg in charge, of course it was. The Courier is directed by Dominic Cooke, whose only big-screen feature before this was On Chesil Beach (reviews persuaded me to skip it); it's rather obvious that he's more of a TV guy, as this movie ends up feeling like two episodes of the kind of BBC series I might have watched during a week of dinners in the '90s. He doesn't have many interesting ideas here; he just puts his camera up close to actors who deserve better and says “Action!” ... which is ironic, since all he has them do is talk, drink, and smoke. I spent the whole movie dreaming of another Gary-Oldman-as-Smiley movie.
But I stayed in my seat because the supporting cast kicks up just enough sparks to make me care about more than just the story's historicity; they treat it like a movie, and that saves it from its lack of visual imagination. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel's Rachel Brosnahan snaps some life into it as CIA agent Emily Donovan, even if her job amounts to little more than sticking up for Wynne when it becomes clear that the CIA might not take his safety as seriously as he does. By contrast, the best that can be said about Angus Wright, as MI6’s Dickie Franks, is that he looks the part and delivers his lines. Jessie Buckley nobly shoulders the burden of playing Wynne's wife, who initially suspects him of infidelity when his stories don't add up, but somehow the film is a lesser thing for making us watch one of the best big-screen actresses alive today shoved into such a familiar, uninteresting role. I can't even remember the character's name. [Checks notes: Shirley.]
I'll avoid spoilers regarding the film's final act, but if you know the true story, you know where we're headed. And you'd be right in thinking that it's very difficult to make such a turn dramatically interesting — not because it lacks drama, but because we've seen it so many times before. (Even Terrence Malick had trouble finding distinctive moments in such dark and troubling circumstances as those that eventually afflict poor Wynne.) Yes, sure, the trailers and the positive reviews are right on one thing: The Courier delivers "a fascinating tale of deceit." But it's the true story that's really remarkable. In better hands, this might have become a memorably suspenseful film as well.
And this is, for me, a clear case of G.K. Chesterton's observation that "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." The Courier isn't a bad movie. I wish it would have been better. Right now, we need stories about heroes who risk everything to save democracies from foreign threats. We need reminders that the planet is in peril when unstable and hot-headed leaders have nuclear weapons within their reach.
But then, such matters have been weighing heavily on my mind lately. I remember living in a country that took Russian threats seriously. Now I live in a country where we don’t celebrate the heroes who risk their lives to preserve our democracy from Russian attacks. We need look no further than the case of Reality Winner to see that Americans are, today, doing the Russians' work for them: We're jailing patriotic, conscience-driven heroes who risked everything to bring us the truth about attacks in progress.
So, by all means, go see The Courier. Cheer for a brave man and for the country that honors his sacrifice. Then, pray for Reality Winner and help me keep her name from being forgotten.
Tenet (2020)
If Christopher Nolan knew what I was doing, it would probably break his IMAX-loving heart. This is not what he intended.
I am watching his new movie not in a movie theater, but in my living room. On a laptop. With headphones on, because there are leafblowers outside, a dishwasher running in the kitchen, and a cat who, finding me distracted, demands my attention.
To borrow a line from the despairing King Theoden:
Nolan clearly wanted to rock the world with a "Go Big or Go Home" event — he made that plain with that ten-minute-long trailer, which showed off the massive scale of its ambitions by turning terrorists (or are they?) loose in a packed symphony hall. This wildly complicated action scene, with its trippy special effects and earth-shaking sound design made it clear: He was leaning hard into his obsessions. Pummeled by Nolan's signature sonic punctuation, I anticipated that this would be exactly what Empire's Alex Godfrey would eventually label it: Nolan's "blammiest film yet."
But then the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the film's release, theaters closed (many permanently), and moviegoers who value their lives begrudgingly shifted their routines to home-theater viewing. When the film finally did open in limited release, it did not persuade many to break their pandemic restrictions, self-imposed or governmental. To make matters worse, word-of-mouth reviews were mixed: The plot was too complicated, even by Nolan standards, and characters were poorly developed (Datebook's Mick LaSalle described the hero as "blank") and hard to care about. Those who insisted on its greatness were, for the most part, already Nolan super-fans.
Me, I steered clear of the whole conversation. My eagerness for Nolan's filmmaking fizzled a long time ago. Things began with a backwards-narrative bang: I loved Memento for the ingenuity of its inverse narrative, but I cared because it was told in extreme close-up, making me care about a man struggling with short-term memory loss. (Also, it was funny.) Memento was a big idea told on a small scale, such that I wasn't just trying to solve a puzzle — I felt the protagonist's desperation.
But as Nolan's films have become progressively larger, louder, more interested in spectacle over storytelling, and more intent on overloading our senses than on inspiring us to care about characters, I've gone from enthusiasm to annoyance. The psychological clashes between characters in Insomnia, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight captivated me in a carefully calibrated context of human drama and big-screen fireworks. But the epic ambitions of The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, Dunkirk, and even, to some extent, the heavy-hearted Interstellar failed to inspire me to come back for closer consideration.
So here I am, insulting his efforts to set movie screens ten stories tall ablaze by watching Tenet on a small screen. To be frank, this is probably the only way I was going to get around to seeing it before it becomes, eventually, a curiosity beloved only by Nolan's most devoted, geeks who love the puzzle-box convolutions of tangled-up time-travel stories.
But maybe it's for the best that I'm experiencing the film this way. Tenet requires so much of the viewer's attention and intellect that if I'd seen it in a theater, beaten half to death by subwoofers and straining to understand the dialogue (that's a complaint I heard from many moviegoers), I probably would have bailed anyway, determining to wait until I could have more control over my circumstances.
And you know what? Watching it like this — on a small screen with easy-to-read captions and a clearer sound mix — I actually enjoyed it. I didn't understand it — no, it doesn't make a bit of sense, and characters in the movie take turns either trying to explaining it to us or telling us not to bother trying to understand. But the pleasure of watching Nolan play with some of his nifty and (at least for this moviegoer) original takes on time travel was worth the two hours, even as the hyper-explosive action reminded me of some of the silly summertime blockbusters of early moviegoing years — particularly Die Hard 2, with its jumbo-jet fireballs.
But even more than that, I'm remembering how so many of science fiction and fantasy stories became my favorites because I experienced in similar circumstances: I was sitting in a comfortable chair at home with a book open in my lap. Okay, technically it's a MacBook that's open in my lap here, but this experience reminds me of the joys of reading a challenging science fiction novel, one built on thrilling ideas. Something about the scale of this experience seemed just right: Tenet is best approached as an entertaining brain-teaser, not something profound that insists we kneel before it.
I mean, while the aesthetics scream to be taken seriously, the characters and the crises suggest that Nolan himself wasn't really interested in them.
As I track this story of Sator, a megalomaniacal billionaire (played by Kenneth Branagh, chewing on a cartoonish Russian accent), who begins messing with both the future and the past in ways that threaten to annihilate human history, and as I follow the desperate efforts of a singularly uninspiring action hero literally called Protagonist (John David Washington), I am not inspired to care much about who lives or dies. (LaSalle again: "Washington, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be playing anything other than an attempt to be cool.")
If anyone in the movie has a chance of making us feel something, it's Kat, Sator's battered wife and the mother of his child. Played by the always-elegant Elizabeth Debicki, Kat is dressed to look like a chilly mannequin whom Sator might have once stretched half-to-death on a medieval torture rack. As she uses her incredibly long arms and legs to try and free herself and her son from the violence of their world-threatening abuser, she may be wearing a name tag saying "HELLO, I AM STOCK NOLAN FEMALE IN CRISIS." To her credit, Nolan lets her show some fight, particularly in a boat scene that recalls Polanksi's Knife in the Water. And I suppose it's a step forward in Nolan's storytelling that he gives so much screen time to a female character, but he has a lot to learn about female characterization.
I wish I could feel here the stakes that I feel watching Shane Carruth's brain-benders Primer and Upstream Color. The former has the satisfying advantage of being focused on a friendship we care about, and its disintegration is genuinely distressing. Tenet ultimately fails because its concept is so much bigger than its characters. Nolan's signature obsession is, unfortunately, the same as so many of his villains — the desire to rig a game in such a way that audiences are forced to scramble in making sense of what they're seeing. There's a little too much of The Prestige's mad magicians (or even Tesla!) in him, a little too much of the Joker's mayhem. It's easy to imagine him guffawing like Bane from his Batman series as he braids his plot lines into a pretzel. (Let's give credit where credit is due: This screenplay must have been a beast to construct, and these action scenes, lensed by Hoyte Van Hoytema and edited by Jennifer Lame, were probably among the most complicated ever choreographed.) He wants us intrigued, challenged, and ultimately dazzled to the point of awe...
... and it's all in service of... what? The inevitable conclusions about love or human decency usually end up feeling more obligatory than affecting. Nolan's addiction to guns and explosions outshouts any inclination he has toward meaning. In his films I am so often taken back through time — back through my own moviegoing time, that is — to that moment in The Matrix when Neo decided that the solution was "guns, lots of guns," and my enthusiasm for the movie instantly collapsed. Exhausted and disoriented by Nolan's curlicue-rollercoasters Nolan, we end up fooled into thinking we've been stirred when, in fact, we've mostly been shaken. (Maybe that's why I'm not among the many campaigning for Nolan to direct a Bond film. I'll take the character, the humor, and the stakes in Casino Royale over this stuff any day.)
Still, while neither the characters nor the crisis interest me, the <i>concepts</i> eventually do: I'm intrigued by the ideas driving the movie's mind games. The nature of this movie's "What if?" experiments remind me of some of Primer's paradoxes and the grander philosophical ambitions of The Matrix trilogy. Special effects artists, perhaps inspired by the backwards-running destruction in Doctor Strange, play with some fantastic derivations of those ideas.
Once the dust settles and the echoes fade, I cannot shake the fact that there are deep matters of conscience at the heart of this story, matters that a greater artist might have teased out more compellingly. Some of them gleam in this exchange:
Protagonist: "He can communicate with the future?"
Arms dealer Priya: "We all do that, don’t we? Emails, credit cards, texts — anything that goes into the record speaks directly to the future. The question is… can the future speak back?"
Now that's an intriguing idea — the sort of inspiration that can light up a science fiction novel.
And this gets me thinking about science fiction itself as a genre. At its best, it's prophetic: It's the the Book of Revelation, a wild vision we can't fully understand but through which the future is speaking back to us, shouting about the wages of our sins-in-progress, but also reminding us that it's not too late. Like a lot of science fiction, Tenet places too much faith in humankind's ability to save itself through strength and technology, and shows little-to-no curiosity about any grander powers at work — except insofar as Love keeps insistently and irrationally working on the Protagonist's heart and motivating his decisions. In Protagonist's all-too-fleeting glimmers of conscience, I catch glimpses of the Divine at work in and through human beings, evidence that maybe God — the uncredited ghost in this well-oiled and exquisitely complicated machine — is present, whether the characters or the artists know it or not.
Having said that, I find one conundrum more challenging than anything else in the film. It's a question consistent with all of my frustrations with this film — a question of scale and proportion. Just as many are asking why Nolan would make a complicated movie so loud that audiences cannot hear clearly the characters' explanations for what is happening, I submit the following question:
Why would anybody ask 6' 3" Elizabeth Debicki to wear high heels?
Nomadland (2020)
Several years ago, I wandered down to the reading room of Laity Lodge, a Texas conference center. I knew it to be the quietest, most restful place at the Lodge, and I needed a break after a few days of constant conversations with other writers. The reading room has an extraordinary view of the glacier-blue Frio River, and it was mid-morning, when sunlight paints a high canyon wall on the opposite side of the river. Vultures lazily patrol the skies, but even they seem calmed by the context. I was eager to be alone for a while, and, of course, to read. I mean, what else would one do in a reading room?
Reader, I did not read in the reading room.
Rather, I sat spellbound, gazing out the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows at what a mesmerizing dance. Birds were streaming up from the riverbank and right at the window, coursing in waves. There were too many moving too fast for me to count them, but they moved in such uncanny choreography that I could not look away. They did not strike the window — they aimed instead for the shadowed underside of the deck that sheltered the path outside. Each bird alighted upside down beneath the deck and madly dabbed bits of mud and clay from the river below. These were cliff swallows, and the small clumps of mud were nests in the making.
Here's a short video of a few magical moments:
https://youtu.be/tG4ewzmuFAA
As I watched and wondered how they could sustain such complicated flight patterns without trouble, a moment came that made me gasp. A hawk dove down over the river, perhaps thinking of snatching one of the swallows out of the air. And in a split second the entire flock moved as one, becoming a river of self-defense, turning and chasing the hawk until it was driven, bewildered, from the scene. And then, before I could blink, they were back, scattering in wild trajectories, picking up on their construction site right where they had left off.
I remember how it felt, how I could hardly believe that I was there to witness it. It felt like gratitude. I could have stayed there for hours. I thought of the line from the twenty-third Psalm: "My cup overflows."
Perhaps that scene sounds strangely familiar to you.
It should... if you've seen Chloe Zhao’s 2020 feature Nomadland.
Based on Jessica Gruber's 2017 work of non-fiction called Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Zhao's film offers us a fictional narrative about a grieving widow named Fern (Frances McDormand) who puts her belongings in storage and begins living out of her van while moving from job to job around the country. Along the way, she gets to know a community of workers who, like her, struggle to make ends meet by pursuing jobs at parks, plants, and Amazon fulfillment centers. And eventually she becomes a part of an intentional community of nomads like her, a community of encouragement, support, and — perhaps most importantly — respect for the members' idiosyncratic boundaries and burdens.
But we also spend a great deal of time alone with Fern as she takes in the beauty and the hardship of those awe-inspiring and often cruel landscapes. Even as we are occasionally enchanted by the sight of undeveloped country in panoramic splendor, sights that a city boy like me rarely sees, we also begin to sense how precarious her situation is, how much she needs community, and how much the community needs her.
One of the nomads who helps Fern out of a jam — an older woman named Swankie (playing herself) — becomes an important mentor on matters of survival. And it isn't long before Fern learns that survival isn't a road that will take Swankie much farther. As they face difficult truths in an intimate conversation, Swankie insists to Fern that she has lived a full life. She measures this fulness by things she has seen: “Moose in the wild. A moose family on a river in Idaho. And big white pelicans landing just six feet over my kayak on a lake in Colorado."
And then she talks about cliff swallows. Hundreds and hundreds of them.
I’m looking at Swankie's face which is illuminated as she describes the wonders that she has seen. But I’m seeing the Frio River cliff swallows in the Texas hill country. And I feel as though I’ve recognized this stranger as a sister.
Nomadland is one of those films in which we travel roads we would never otherwise travel, meet extraordinary people we would never otherwise meet, and find ourselves blessed in intimate and revelatory moments when they share something of themselves. It feels like a feast of unforgettable encounters. And in that, it becomes an experience so rare that I find myself thinking back with gratitude on a few other filmmakers, artists who were, I suspect, influential in the inspiration of this film.
On the map of cinema, I never expected to find an intersection joining the corners of Agnes Varda, Terrence Malick, and John Sayles. That's where I met The Rider, my first encounter with Chloe Zhao. I was moved and impressed. But now I've seen Nomadland, which is, by my lights, an even grander achievement. And I realize that I am present to witness the raising of what might become a great house in one of my favorite neighborhoods.
Forget about Nomadland's Oscar buzz and spotlight interviews — they're unnecessary. That's show business trying to interrupt an authentic moment and celebrate something real so that it can make itself look meaningful. But Zhao's movies don't need Oscars; they're already the real thing, the rare wonder, the revelation that cinema can give us. Time will prove their quality, and any Oscars will end up a footnote. The best I can hope for from the Academy's attention is that some unsuspecting moviegoers might be introduced to the potential of the art form, wake up, become curious, and start exploring beyond the bounds of multiplex consumerism and find out what a wide, wild world cinema really is.
The movies are a business. And show business is interested in learning what you already like so it can know what to sell you, take more of your money, and get more advertisements in front of you. Show business comes from studies and surveys and formulas. Show business isn't interested in challenging you, inspiring you, or cultivating empathy. It likes its categories and its algorithms. The movies are a grid, a network of boxes: a grid that helps business calculate and expand.
Cinema, by contrast, is a world of creative freedom. It comes from imaginations driven by and drunk on beauty and truth, people who will put second mortgages on their homes and spend their life savings in order to bring their visions to life. Their work is playful, curious, exploratory. It refuses categories ad looks at formulas as opportunities for surprise and change. Cinema's a globe, and an ever-changing one, with porous borders so rivers of influence flow freely across cultures and languages. It welcomes inspiration and it enables inspiration, so those who attend to it best be ready: They might come to know the lives and ways of neighbors they never knew they had. They might learn new languages. They might escape becoming mere consumers led by the system; they might become more fully human.
Okay — I get it: I'm describing a false binary. Sure, the Movies and Cinema overlap in all kinds of ways. After all, Moviegoers sometimes develop an appetite for art. And Cinephiles are an audience that, like any audience category on the grid of The Movies, can be marketed to. Many of the greatest filmmakers are also savvy businesspeople with their eyes on the box office, and many up-and-coming independent imaginations are aiming for their shot at a Marvel movie. So I'm not doing anyone any good if I paint these worlds as oppositional and exclusive.
But the more I grow weary of franchise-focused, formulaic movies, and the more I become allergic to nostalgia merchants, the more I find myself grateful for those artists, those loners, those imaginations out on the edges of things. For Wim Wenders and Claire Denis, for Lee Isaac Chung and Jim Jarmusch, for Sean Baker and Sofia Coppola.
Right now, I'm thankful for Chloe Zhao. In two remarkable films, she has gone off the grid, exploring aspects of America that most filmmakers either avoid or never discover at all. She is interested in the overlooked, the neglected, the unwanted. She is interested in the poor and the pain that they carry. And so, in a spirit that I cannot help but describe as "Christ-like," she loves those neighbors with her camera, with her storytelling, and with her editing. Zhao strikes me as an artist who finds her films by listening rather than forcing other people and other places into her preconceived notions.
And in doing so, she carries the torch of Agnes Varda, revealing the dignity and glory of those living beyond the borders of pop-culture's superficial, glamour-obsessed favor. She carries the torch of John Sayles, devoted to the art of compassionate storytelling. She carries the torch of Terrence Malick, well aware that the place in which a story unfolds is every bit as important as the characters — and, in fact, that place is a character, one with much to say, one we ignore at our peril.
With Nomadland, she's prepared a place place that brings those influences together while she breaks new ground all her own. Infusing a real-world nomadic American community with just enough fiction to sculpt a convincing narrative arc, and following Frances McDormand in the discovery of her most exquisite performance, Zhao keeps us moving from place to place on the edges of American society, and in doing so it establishes a new point on the map for our moviegoing souls — a place to grieve together, to look and listen, and to love. It's a lonely place, and a costly one. But it offers views and encounters that we will never forget.
Here, Zhao builds on the strengths of The Rider and reveals that she is growing fast as a filmmaker. She already has a singular voice and vision as truthful and as beautiful as any in American filmmaking today. But the thing is... she's not an American filmmaker. Sometimes, it takes a visitor to show us who we are. (Zhao is Chinese.) If someone can hold up such a clear and revealing mirror and speak the truth with love, well... that is a rare and priceless gift. I am grateful.
Nomadland is full of expressions of love — I don't know what else to call it — for the people Zhao discovers in her journeys and for the filmmakers whose distinctive visions have inspired and shaped her own. The two I thought about most were Malick and Varda. I caught what I think to be deliberate callbacks to The Tree of Life, Vagabond, and even The Gleaners and I. But the casting of Straithairn as a burdened wanderer may be a nod to Sayles's Limbo, another attentive and compassionate look at people compelled to live on the literal edge.
But I don't want to give the impression that Nomadland is pastiche. Zhao's way of making movies is unique, and her passion for honoring those who live on the road, in the in-between places, and out on the edges of things strikes me as a filmmaking form of Gospel.
This movie had me thinking about people I've met along the way who I can't stop thinking about, people who you aren't likely to meet because they tend to keep to themselves — not because they're running from something, not because they're introverts, not because of... anything simple. It had me thinking about Jesus and how he sought out and loved those who didn't fit anybody else's idea of "success" and honored them by serving them.
Whether it's in a rush of birds or a congregation of nomads, the Kingdom of God is at hand for those with eyes to see — and right now I don't know that I trust any filmmaker to capture it more than I trust Zhao right now. No movie in 2020 moved me more than Nomadland.