Cabrini celebrates a true Christian vision of embracing immigrants and opposing cruelty
An early draft of this review was originally published on March 28, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Cabrini is a rare and pleasant surprise — a movie from a religious production company that generally avoids cringe-worthy proselytizing and — even more impressively — gives evidence that the filmmakers prioritize beauty and strive to fill the big screen with enchanting images.
But best of all, in a season when “religious media” vigorously promotes fascism, a surge of Christian nationalism that could not be more antithetical to Jesus’ teachings, and the demonization of those with brown and black skin, Cabrini celebrates a truly inspiring saint — Frances Saverio Cabrini — whose mission was to affirm that America is made of immigrants, relies on immigrants, and should never abandon its mission of welcoming and celebrating immigrants.
Going into the film, I knew next to nothing about St. Frances Cabrini…
… and I still don’t know nearly enough.
But I can say this: Her story is extraordinary — just the kind of narrative we need to restore hope for change in a darkening world. She survived childhood tuberculosis and other afflictions that should have ended her story early, kept alive perhaps by her stubborn determination to change the world — specifically the East. When the Pope re-directed her energies toward America, she embarked on myriad missions of compassion and grace, defying authorities of both church and state.
As Steven Greydanus, in his excellent review for Catholic Spirit, reminds us (or, for some, informs us):
Today St. Frances Cabrini is celebrated as a pioneer: the first U.S. citizen to become a canonized saint, the first Catholic woman to lead an overseas mission, and the trailblazing founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which runs charitable institutions the world over. Yet Cabrini emphasizes that none of it would have happened had Mother Cabrini been content to remain in spaces deemed appropriate for her by the powerful men around her. Opening on March 8, International Women’s Day, Cabrini evokes the much-misattributed remark of American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich that “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
Unfortunately, a lot of critics are lining up to dismiss Cabrini outright — probably because director Alejandro Monteverde was responsible for last year’s appalling, fraudulent “social justice movie” fiasco Sound of Freedom, which gave QAnon conspiracy theorist and MAGA poster boy Jim Caviezel all kind of media attention and glorified a controversial and troubling figure who, thanks to the movie, was very quickly discredited. Despite the film’s apparent mission to fight sex trafficking, organizations involved in busting sex-trafficking operations around the world loudly protested, saying that the methods glorified in the movie were actually doing more harm than good.
So, no — I cannot blame anybody for steering clear of Cabrini, not when they’ve been so recently burned.
But I think we need to acknowledge, respect, and applaud the movie’s remarkable strengths.
Cabrini an old-fashioned sort of big-screen tribute to a saintly historical figure, a kind of movie we rarely see anymore. (I’m reminded of A Man for All Seasons, although this screenplay, for all of its noble intentions and virtuous ideals, has nothing on that film’s artful banter or sophisticated sparring matches between rhetoricians.) Rob Barr’s screenplay is thin on characterization and heavy-handed with metaphor. (How many times must we see the young Cabrini slowly sinking into a watery abyss of despair?) It’s about as subtle as an after-school special about bullying written to teach teens a lesson. And Monteverde never misses a cue for his hero to fiercely throw down quotable feminist slogans against her enemies or to set her jaw and fight back whenever she’s told that she’s meddling in territories where a woman “doesn’t belong.”
One thing that annoys me all the way through is that, even in crowded scenes, only the Most Important characters speak — and I use the word "characters" reluctantly. Sister Cabrini has only one or two distinguishing characteristics throughout, despite Dell'Anna's assertive embodiment of her stubborn conviction. Her “tuberculosis cough” may inspire our concern, but it doesn’t deepen our understanding of her character. Cabrini’s company of nuns follow her around like a flock of geese, saying nothing at all. It’s almost as if they’ve been deliberately silenced to save the production money. They’re rarely more than blank drones carrying out her instructions. Isn’t it kind of disingenuous, in a movie that’s supposed to champion the agency and genius of women, to make so many female characters seem so mindless, serving only as an aesthetic backdrop that accentuates the one whose name is in lights? Almost everything and everyone exist as accents or contrast, keeping our focus on the haloed saint.
But it’s easy to forgive the shallowness, obviousness, and grandstanding when we’re treated to such impressive historic recreations of New York, evidence of the talents of production designer Carlos Lagunas and cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu. Thanks to them, you can smell the slums of New York’s hellish Five Points neighborhood, which the cops avoid, and where pimps and robbers and murderers rule. You can feel the chill of the swirling fog that engulfs the panoramic countryside just beyond the crowded cityscapes. (I remember thinking that this looks like the New York of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, an enchanted New York story that was spectacularly squandered in Akiva Goldsman’s terrible 2014 adaptation.) Lens flares and beacons are everywhere, going off like fireworks in cathedrals; like rays of prophecy in halls of government; like visitations of the Holy Spirit in dilapidated structures, wherein Cabrini envisions new institutions that serve the poor; like infusions of courage within cramped spaces where Cabrini is confronted by her male antagonists. They’re often accompanied by a symphonic score that demands our hearts be moved. Monteverde sets his film in oceans of classical music, seemingly inspired by Terrence Malick techniques in The New World, The Tree of Life, and A Hidden Life.
And Gómez Andreu’s camera is in love with the clenched jaw and burning eyes of his leading actress: Cristiana Dell’Anna, who, as the spirited Mother Francesca Cabrini, stares directly into the camera, seemingly incensed with all of us for allowing anti-immigrant agendas to advance here in 2024.
The film’s most nuanced performance comes from David Morse as an endearingly obstinate Archbishop of New York. The most quietly engaging turn comes from Patch Darragh as the tender-hearted Dr. Murphy, who gives Cabrini the vision for a great New York hospital. John Lithgow is here, chewing cigars and quaffing glasses of whiskey as the cartoonishly and buffoonishly terrible anti-Italian Mayor Gould of New York. And Jeremy Bobb makes a strong impression in just a few minutes’ screentime as a New York Times journalist who informs the world that “rats have it better than children” in the city Five Points neighborhood.
But perhaps my favorite turn in the film is the most complicated one. Giancarlo Giannini is a legendary Italian actor whose impressive credits span more than half a century of great cinema. Here he plays Pope Leo XII, whose initial resistance to Sister Cabrini’s appeals soften as he begins to see the folly in the patriarchal institution’s oppression of women. Whenever we see the pope turn to reckon with Cabrini’s challenges, the gravity of the character’s intellect and conscience is compelling. In a film that is simplistic on the page, Giannini and Morse are the actors who do so much more on the screen than what they’re given by their scripts.
And yet, while the movie's "Saint Good, World Horrible" dynamic isn't going to challenge us toward any meaningful revelations, I cannot just shrug and brush this movie aside like so many of my colleagues. We cannot underestimate the fact that Cabrini is being promoted to American evangelicals and MAGA audiences with an emphasis on the glory of immigrants as the lifeblood of America. It sounds like a movie that Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott would loudly expel from Florida and Texas cineplexes. It sounds like a movie that makes Trump's vile rants about immigrants as "animals" and "vermin" and "not even human" sound like the satanic calls for cruelty that they really are.
What’s more, Cabrini rightly asserts as a fundamental of true Christianity that followers of Jesus are identified as those who serve the stranger and who welcome the immigrant. Monteverde does not hold back in making a joke of the Christian tradition’s counterproductive reliance on prejudicial patriarchal systems.
Overall, this movie seems far more likely to sensitize people to the cruelty of the GOP’s anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-democracy, anti-Christ agenda than to rally them towards it. (But then, Trump is out there vigorously selling Bibles to raise money for his legal defense, the very Scriptures that consistently denounce everything he says and does. I have to assume that MAGA-types are all but illiterate when it comes to what’s actually inside the Bible’s the Scriptures they claim as their foundation. If they found the Jesus of the Bible standing in their path, they’d crucify him again without blinking.)
I admit, I cringed and I groaned when Cabrini’s end credits were interrupted by a huge QR code, part of the movie's marketing ploy, begging us to get our phones and “Pay It Forward.” (The vast cineplex theater I was in had exactly five moviegoers in it.) And I laughed when a timer appeared at the bottom of the screen like an apology for the fact that end credits are necessary at all, accompanied by a desperate appeal to "PLEASE" stay and listen to a cheesy end-credits song about being a light in the darkness.
Still, I’ll take Cabrini any day over another Jim Ca-jeezus White Savior Propaganda film. Or another movie about how prayer wins football games. Or another one about evangelical college students should rise up against intellectuals and scientists and those who actually use the brains God gave them to investigate the world’s mysteries. Best of all, there’s no glimpse anywhere in these New York streets of either Kirk Cameron or Kevin Sorbo.
I think we should be glad Cabrini is out there. Angel Studios could do the world some good if it invested in more "religious" filmmaking of this variety, slowly steering the ship in the direction of inspiring artistry and away from preachy entertainment, and appealing to our conscience, and prioritizing the poor and the vulnerable, instead of aggravating our cultural polarization and reinforcing systemic corruption.
I keep wondering about the four other moviegoers who saw Cabrini with me. If they were fans of Sound of Freedom, I hope they found this sobering and substantial. If, like me, they walked in skeptical and perhaps even a little cynical, I can empathize, but I hope they came away encouraged.
Love Lies Bleeding "hulks out" with surreal surprises
An early draft of this review was originally published on March 21, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
In my classes on writing poetry and fiction, we focus intently on suspending our readers' disbelief with the power of startling specificity. Are your readers looking at a page and seeing vivid imagery in the world you create? Hearing specific voices within your distinctive world of sound? Or — here’s the toughest one — breathing the particular air of your environments? (Olfactory capacities are the most difficult to awaken with writing.) In short: Do your readers believe? Regardless of whether your premise is plausible, does it feel true enough to readers that they don’t feel the pages turning?
The premise for Love Lies Bleeding, the new film from director Rose Glass, is highly implausible — even more unlikely than the narrative of her first feature, the riveting religious horror film Saint Maud. But while it's as nuts as a pitch for “The Incredible Hulk meets Thelma and Louise meets Mandy,” its world is so immersive, so particular, I had no trouble suspending disbelief. It made me laugh in the midst of severe scenarios. It made me care about crazy characters. And in spite of its bleak and violent vision — I find myself eager to see it again.
Try this on: Lou (Kristen Stewart) spends long miserable days working at a gym in small-town New Mexico, doing everything from managing memberships to cleaning toilets. She has good reason to hate life; Lou’s the resentful daughter of a rural crime lord named Lou (yes, you read that right). He’s violent enough that she’s too scared to turn him in, even though F.B.I. agents are showing up at her workplace with questions.
One day, Lou’s luck changes: A female bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O’Brian) shows up in town and takes a job at Lou Sr.’s gun club — which is called "Louville" (yes, you read that right). When Jackie walks into Lou Jr.’s gym, the two start sharing steroids… and more.
But this isn’t the kind of town where love, dreams, or conscience stand a chance. When Lou’s abusive brother-in-law (James Franco) takes one swing too many at Lou’s sister (Jena Malone, who, let’s face it, should always play Kristen Stewart’s sister), well… Lou thinks she might have found an advantage: a girlfriend who can punish any abuser in town. Pretty soon, the movie’s title makes too much sense. And Jackie’s steroid problem becomes a problem for everyone — especially her new enemies.
If that sounds crazy, well, trust me — it’s gets crazier.
And yet, I believed. In a season when theaters are saturated with formulaic media, it’s a rare thing to have an experience where you believe in something this bonkers, where you care about characters caught in such preposterous circumstances, and where you’re leaning forward moment to moment with no idea what will happen next.
Just as I quickly fell under Saint Maud’s spell, I was happy to be trapped in this movie’s ridiculous New Mexico twilight zone. I felt dust stinging my eyes when the wind blew. I could smell the sweat in Lou Jr.’s gym. And I believed the movie’s wild rides into magical realism — because Lou and Jackie believed them (and Stewart and O’Brian give convincing performances in surreal situations). It’s almost as if the intermingling of their steroid-saturated bodily fluids has given them a shared alternate reality, and we’re not sure whether we’re watching a monster movie or madness.
I’m more surprised than any of you that I came out of the theater a fan of Love Lies Bleeding. I’d walked in with some trepidation.
And I had three good reasons for that:
- Movies full of gunshots usually make me wish I’d spent the time doing something more worthwhile, and there are a lot of gunshots in this movie. In the real world, gun violence is a curse. In the movies, it’s so ubiquitous that it’s a bore.
- Movies that linger on lesbians in love often aggravate me because so many are off-puttingly lurid and so obviously designed to delight adolescent male moviegoers. And much of the film’s big buzz has come from the promise of seeing superstar Kristen Stewart in explicit girl-on-girl action. My LGBTQ sisters deserve respect, not exploitation. So, I was inclined to give this movie a pass (until word of mouth from reliable critics convinced me to give it a chance).
- I can’t quickly recall any films focused on bodybuilders or boxers or wrestlers that has made me admire or care about all of that obsession with muscle.
But now that I’ve seen Love Lies Bleeding, I can address each of these issues.
First, the gun violence. Most of the action in Love Lies Bleeding transpires at or around a gun club called Louville, run by — who else? — Lou (Ed Harris). Lou also happens to be a criminal kingpin who knows where a lot of bodies are buried because, well, he buried them… after he perforated them with is pistol. But the gunfire here is mostly background noise meant to keep us on edge. And Ed Harris, savoring a chance to play a devil, is scary and hilarious. He’s scare-larious!
Second — what about those much-hyped, hot-and-heavy sex scenes? Frankly, they’re fleeting and they’re filmed without gratuitous nudity. (This film might rate a “4” or a “5” on the Explicit and Unnecessary Sex Scene chart, where the Oscar-winning Poor Things, by contrast, would break the chart at “11.”) Their intensity has more to do with just how desperately these needy lovers reach for one another in a world that has taught them to distrust, fear, and even revile most men.
And what about the bodybuilding? Don’t worry. This isn’t Pumping Iron or The Wrestler. Close-ups on bulging biceps play more as premonition; they represent the pressure building up that will eventually blow open Lou Sr.’s hermetically sealed crime world. I anticipated that the climactic violence would take place in Las Vegas at the competition that Jackie’s been training for, but that doesn’t happen. The movie is much more interested in unleashing Lou’s musclebound dreamgirl in Lou Sr.’s misogynistic hellscape.
I admire how director Rose Glass made me believe in the two women at the center of her first surrealistic horror film. Saint Maud is about a lonely, isolated, wounded young nurse (Morfydd Clark) who, as a result of past trauma, is prone to believing in her own personal fantasyland, one influenced by a perversion of Catholic piety. She believes she’s on a supernatural mission to save the soul of an ailing dancer (the great Jennifer Ehle), when, in fact, she’s actually manufacturing a sense of purpose and looking for excuses to lash out at anyone who might interrupt her intimacy with her patient. And so, Maud becomes dangerously possessive and deluded about the truth of her situation. Glass, like a writer committed to an intense limited-third-person point of view, directs the film in a way that traps us within Maud’s altered state. We have to ask if what we’re seeing is a manifestation of Maud’s madness, or if she might in fact be making her own fantastical visions come true.
Love Lies Bleeding is an altogether different film in style and substance. And yet, we can see that Glass is revealing what I hope will become the central thematic thread of a long and fascinating filmography. Lou, like Maud, is lonely, isolated, wounded, and — likely as a response to trauma — quick to give in to delusions if they will lead her to love (or something like it). And so, once again, moviegoers spill out into the lobby immediately questioning whether or not they should take the film’s climactic violence literally. This story slowly metamorphizes from a homoerotic thriller to something more like a monster movie. Glass ever so gradually steers us off of the freeway of familiar stories about women who join forces and try to beat their oppressive system, and then she drives us into a darker world of magical realism.
A lot of critics are comparing this movie to the Wachowskis’ erotic noir Bound — for obvious reasons. But the movies that I ended up thinking about most, quite unexpectedly, were Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In.
Green’s movie is about two young women who seek adventure in a hot, dusty, isolated environment where the resident men circle them like predators and the resident women laugh as if this is just the way of the world. It’s sensual, it’s fierce, and it’s a pressure cooker of righteous anger that leads almost inevitably to climactic violence. I was disappointed by its abrupt, unimaginative conclusion. By contrast, Love Lies Bleeding is much more interesting. Instead of making it easy to pick sides in an us-versus-them fight, it asks us to question whether or not we think these two rebels with good causes are making wise choices.
Alfredson’s moody vampire movie introduces us to a vulnerable and traumatized young boy who, having no one else to help him in a world designed to ruin him, so easily accepts the offer of a vampire’s love in order to gain an advantage — even though that would mean killing for the sake of survival. Its conclusion is truly horrifying. We have to ask ourselves, “What are we endorsing as our tortured young protagonist makes his escape?” Let the Right One In is a tragedy. And while Love Lies Bleeding is primarily a pitch-black comedy, I’d argue that its closing notes suggest something similarly tragic. Glass makes us squirm in the movie’s final moments, making it impossible to ignore the body count that these lovers are adding up. They may think they’re headed off into a “happily ever after,” and we might think so too. But note where Glass chooses to close to the story. Is it meant to be a joke? Or a reality check regarding the kind of person Lou Jr. is becoming?
So no — Love Lies Bleeding is not a movie I’m going to champion for its moral vision. This is genuine film noir — a genre about worlds that are corrupt beyond saving, and about antiheroes who can’t succeed without compromising their integrity. In this world of two Lous, misogynistic violence is so prevalent and brutal that we can empathize with these disintegrating women who cannot escape without doing deadly damage themselves. They turn to violence in desperation, as it’s the only path they can find that offers them a measure of tenderness. They sink into delusion as reality proves too cruel to bear.
But the bigger question is this: Who can blame them? Who can deny that their circumstances are tragic? Their choices are destructive, but their options are awful. They’ve never known love to be something generous, patient, gentle, or forgiving. They live in a world of snarling beasts, and while they may not find their way to true freedom, at least they’re finding a fundamental love language. They’re lurching in the right direction — through a world both absurdly fantastical and frightfully, believably like our own.
The spirit of '80s Tim Burton is alive in Lisa Frankenstein
An early draft of this review was originally published on February 17, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
What a perfect conduit for the talents of REO Speedwagon.
Forgive me — I try to avoid co-opt lines from a movie’s dialogue for review purposes, but that one is just too fitting to pass up. Director Zelda Williams’ Lisa Frankenstein is, above all, an excuse to revel in some distinctly 1980s’ pop culture, from the needle drops (which are effective, and surprisingly eclectic) to the costumes (which raid the closets of Cyndi Lauper and Madonna), to the analog Edward Gorey-ish aesthetic of early Tim Burton.
With a whimsical if anticlimactic script by Diablo Cody — yes, the filmmaker who wrote Juno, Jennifer’s Body, Young Adult, and Tully — it’s a whole lot of frivolous fun as it plays, striking some charming notes that will remind you of Edward Scissorhands’ fairy tale fantasy, and more dissonant notes that recall Heathers. And it’s that rare comedy that knows exactly how long its silly little premise will last and then neatly wraps things up and lets us go home. Hard to believe that that is still possible.
The pitch is so simple and sure to sell, it’s shocking we haven’t seen this movie before. The year is 1989 (I’m already sold, as that’s the year I graduated from high school), and Lisa (Kathryn Newton) is suffering serious PTSD from the horrific murder of her mother. Finishing high school in the home of her half-wit father (Joe Chrest), a jazzercizing Maleficent of a stepmother (Carla Gugino), and a cheerleading Heather-of-a-stepsister (Liza Soberano), she’s a class outcast for being out of step with the narrowly drawn “types” of students.
When one of those magical movie lightning storms jolts a corpse into Franken-animation, Lisa is somewhat distracted from her crush on the school literary journal editor by a tall, dark, and slimy stranger (Cole Sprouse). Hiding him in the closet like her teenage fantasy E.T., Lisa slowly discovers that she has a new secret weapon against anybody who might inconvenience her. After all, he’s willing to kill if he can score replacement body parts by doing so. (This zombie has higher priorities than brains). Over-the-top bloodshed ensues, all but guaranteeing that this will be a Halloween party favorite for decades to come.
It’s strange that Heathers seems to be the trending reference point for high school sex comedies right now. Bottoms is still fresh in our minds, right? But that film’s reckless audacity seems to be reminding a new generation of filmmakers of the value of surprise — even nasty, R-rated surprise.
While ‘80s sex comedies have never been a brand I’ve been eager to revisit, I liked Bottoms a lot, and I had a lot of fun with Lisa Frankenstein. I’m not fond of revenge stories, but there is something cathartic and truthful, something valuable in good-humored reminders that our sins will find us out — whether we be the sort who uphold the harmful cliques of adolescence or the uglier sort who commit sexual assault if they have the chance. Lisa is a victim of violent crime, and in her compromised state she is prone to endorse violent revenge if she can. I don’t applaud her methods, but I understand and empathize. Let this review be an endorsement of stories that warn against transgression, not a vote cast for violence.
The cast of Lisa Frankenstein, while unremarkable, is clearly having fun. The costuming is a joy. And it’s a delight to be reminded of how brightly movies like Tim Burton’s early work shone while we weren’t distracted by the turbulence their young stars suffered soon after. (I wonder what the late careers of Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp, and Christian Slater might look like today if they’d had wiser career mentors along the way.)
My enjoyment may have been influenced by a couple of unlikely factors unique to my screening:
First — the crowd, if you can call a dozen moviegoers a crowd. The young women in the almost-empty theater were screaming with laughter whenever Newton and Sprouse were alone on screen together. Diablo Cody has their number, let me tell you. I haven't heard so much girl-power solidarity in a theater since opening week of Barbie. I'm curious to see if word-of-mouth makes this thing a bigger hit than anybody saw coming.
Second — the timing. I was wearing my headphones, with only one ear uncovered so I could track the movie. In the other ear, I was listening to the live broadcast of the Super Bowl's fourth quarter plus overtime. (Don’t judge me: No one else had reserved seats in the back-right quadrant of the theater, so nobody even noticed.) And you know what? I enjoyed both the game and the movie just fine.
While it’s a shame that none of the cast show the potential to become this generation’s Depp, Ryder, or Slater, or look poised for long-running careers like most of the cast in the retro-80s Stranger Things, the whole thing feels like joyous cosplay. Lisa Frankenstein may not be much more than a flimsy tribute to the days of Beetlejuice and She’s So Unusual, but that’s enough to make my late-80s high schooler heart happy for a fleeting 101 minutes.
What They Said:
Alissa Wilkinson at The New York Times:
Perhaps you spent the late 1980s and early ’90s doing something other than being a school-age girl. So it’s worth noting that the title of the film is a nod to a company, named for its founder, that produced brightly colored stickers with characters like unicorns and kittens and bears that eventually made their way to the broader school supply set. (In grade school circa 1992, my friends and I yearned for Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers, the true marker of cool.)
I was a little bummed out to discover that, despite the title, the nostalgic brand never really shows up in the movie — in fact, the vibe isn’t Lisa Frank-esque at all. But it’s OK, because “Lisa Frankenstein” is girly-gothy, in a way that’s a lot of fun once you get used to it. In fact, the best thing about the film is its production design, which takes familiar trappings from movies of the era (I thought of everything from “Poltergeist” to “Edward Scissorhands” to “Pretty in Pink” to “Weird Science,” itself a loose “Frankenstein” adaptation) and just dials up the color temperature a few degrees. It’s a pastiche crossed with a tribute, complete with references to slasher films, Cinderella, loner high school flicks and a makeover montage. Plus, of course, “Frankenstein.”
Kevin McLenithan at Letterboxd:
Lisa Frankenstein is mostly interested in asking what it would be like if Frankenstein’s monster wore a Violent Femmes t-shirt and had to learn what a vibrator is.
Adam Driver plays a driver — again! — in Michael Mann's Ferrari
An early draft of this review was originally published on December 31, 2023,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Few events on the movie calendar pique my interest like a new feature from Michael Mann. His films Heat (1995) and The Insider (1999) are among my all-time favorites, both of them powerful examples that style is substance. Mann remains uniquely focused on men who are obsessed with excellence in particular pursuits, and how each man’s obsession draws him into moral compromises that become his Achilles’ heel. His interest in the women who love these men, and the prices they pay for loving unreliable, obsessive geniuses? That varies from movie to movie.
I felt some trepidation approaching this film. His feature films since 2006’s feature Colin Farrell/Jamie Foxx revival of Miami Vice has seemed less than inspired, almost like he was becoming more and more interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking and less and less interested in compelling, contemplative storytelling. 2009’s Public Enemies was engaging but unsatisfying, and Blackhat felt like B-grade Mann without any interesting variations.
https://youtu.be/8oOVNMjM1Jk?si=f7aP_0LISk4OXc_i
What would Ferrari, a passion project he has been talking about for decades, be like? Would it feel like a sort of culmination to the master’s career, a symphonic peak of his distinct stylistic priorities and his thematic explorations?
The movie is here, and now we know. The answer is… “Not really.”
Ferrari is well worth seeing for Mann’s reliably stylish work, for viscerally thrilling races, for a couple of strong performances, for a startling supporting turn from a snow-white-haired Patrick Dempsey, and for a troubling tale of ethical compromise and consequences. At the same time, I’m not sure Mann is going far enough. It’s all too easy to come away seduced by the dazzle of the brand and the giant who drives it, despite the lies, the recklessness, and the arrogance on display.
Adam Driver plays Enzo Ferrari — a very tall American 40-year-old playing a stout Italian 60-something — during a short span of days in which he risks the survival of his world-renowned company by driving (sorry!) his race car drivers to win a highly competitive race in sleek, red, innovative new sports cars. As he gambles it all for victory, he tries to manage the increasing suspicions and dissatisfaction of his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) as they continue to grieve the death of their only son, while also trying to sustain secrecy about a lover, Lina Lardy (Shailene Woodley), and their secret child Piero (Giuseppe Festinese).
Clearly, there’s no shortage of trouble and tension, several stressful strands for Mann to twist into knots. Ferrari, which runs almost two and a half hours, flies by as Enzo zigzags from ruling over his drivers to arguing with his financial advisors to clashing with Laura to trying to reassure Lina and Piero. He tries to project calm and control, but those furrows in his brow deepen as if they might fracture his head. We can sense that his panic is not unlike that expressed by Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems.
The highlight of the film is, of course, the racing, which is even more thrilling in speed, sight, and sound than the fighter-jet sequences of Top Gun: Maverick. Every time one of those Ferrari race cars revs its engine, and the whole theater resonates, I think about how it sounds like the motors are growling "Ferr-AR-i, Ferr-ARRRR-i."
But I admit some discontent with the excitement I find in these races. It’s a corrupt industry, one that plays fast and loose with human lives, and it represents a quest for glory that is compromised to the core. Yes, there is beauty in the art of designing the perfect automobile, and nobility in testing the limits of what we imagine humans are capable of. But at what cost? Are these endeavors overseen by someone who cares about his employees? Or is he throwing their lives out onto the racetrack like dice, playing the odds in the hopes of advancing his family name?
And, in the film’s preachiest aspect — a lesson hammered home in the trailer — Enzo insists that two objects cannot share the same space at the same time. He’s talking about racing of course, but in his love life and in fatherhood he is challenging that very law. And there will be a grievous price for more than just himself to pay.
Teaching everyone an inevitable lesson, Ferrari gives us the worst car accident I have ever seen on a big screen. I'm not sure that's anything for Mann to brag about, but there it is. I'd heard buzz about a bad onscreen accident, so I was bracing for it. I didn't know the historical account or what to expect. I was not prepared. I physically recoiled and did not recover (even though the movie seemed to think we could all move on and get back to worrying about how Enzo was going to resolve his extramarital affair).
Meanwhile, Mann’s own gambles pay off fairly well here — chief among them being the casting of Driver. He’s too tall, yes. He’s too young, sure. His Italian accent is unpersuasive. And yet — this is a film full of extreme closeups, and Driver’s face is a perfect canvas for the conflict, the ferocity, and the seeming incomprehension of just how severely is tempting disaster. He commands our attention whenever he’s onscreen.
(And while we're on the subject: Paterson, Ferrari ... What will be the next movie in which Driver plays a driver in a vehicle-focused movie? And what kind of transportation will he conquer next?)
The "terrible joy" speech — the highlight of his performance and the ideal Oscar clip from this film — is such a concise expression of one of the foundational questions of Michael Mann's filmography: Why are so many men driven (sorry) to sell their souls to achieve such shallow and worldly definitions of "success"? How are they able to rationalize and ultimately harden their hearts regarding the devastation they unleash on people around them? It's a great callback to Heat.
Some have speculated that maybe this is a sort of self-portrait, that Ferrari's drive is similar to Mann's own drive. That doesn't quite work for me: I don't see Mann's artistry leaving casualties in its wake. The film faces up to Ferrari's depravity in ways that make me think Mann is a much wiser and more conscientious human being.
But having said that, I am still somewhat uncomfortable with this film. As vividly as it portrays the harm done by Ferrari's arrogance and irresponsibility, I still think that audiences will come away even more enamored of the brand, and that some will likely come away thinking of Enzo as some kind of hero. (As Ryland Walker Knight posted on Letterboxd, "The spectacle of capitalism argument doesn’t add up in an estate sanctioned hagiography with a family business end card.") Even though the film shocks us and sickens us with the bloody cost of “the game,” it is quick to redirect our attention from casualties treated as collateral damage to refocus us quickly on Enzo’s domestic drama.
Worse, Enzo’s an exemplar of the worst kind of masculinity — his word isn’t worth anything, he treats women as necessary complications, and his ego is his compass. (His mother is no help with any of this; she only values a woman who can provide her son with an heir.) Mann doesn’t directly condone Ferrari’s faults, but where does he leave this narrative? Are moviegoers more likely to come away reverent toward the brand that has given them such visceral, glamorous thrills? Or will they be sobered by the kind of hard-hearted arrogance that forged this corporation’s prestige?
Is my concern really about the movie? Or just the lack of discernment in so many moviegoers? I’m not exactly sure.
But I’m having second thoughts about one of my earlier claims. I’m going to take back my claim that Driver “commands” our attention in every scene. In making such a claim, I’m disrespecting Penelope Cruz, who reminds us that she is the supreme talent in this film, an actress at the peak of her powers, turning what is typically a thankless role (the jealous wife) into a memorable storm of strategic countermeasures. If I see Ferrari again — and I’m not sure I can stomach that car accident again — I’ll watch it above all for her. Here we have what may be a first in all of Mann’s filmography: a film about obsessive men in which a woman steals the show.
Still shaking from that glorious, exhilarating restoration of Stop Making Sense, I have to say that Ferrari ranks as only the second-best film I saw in 2023 about a thin man wearing a massive suit. And I have no trouble saying that, committing himself to creative collaboration and excellence that lifts people up instead of exalting himself, David Byrne wore it better.
Teyana Taylor deserved an Oscar nomination for A Thousand and One
An early draft of this review was originally published on December 21, 2023,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
I thought a lot about Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning feature Moonlight as I watched A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One.
Both films are about how the odds are stacked against young Black boys in America, especially if they start in poverty or without the ever-presence of vigilant, resourceful parents. Both are about how the care of loving, faithful grownups can make all the difference.
And, fortunately, they’re both powerful and memorable stories.
Still, much that made Moonlight engaging — the poetic imagery, the sumptuously colorful cinematography, the score — feels lacking to me here. The world according to Rockwell here is convincing in its hard and jagged realism, often dwelling in a cold, grim color scheme that immerses us effectively in a bleak world. But I found myself hungry for some visual poetry.
On the other hand, one of Moonlight’s most interesting challenges — the casting of three different actors to play young Chiron enduring trials of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood — works better for me in A Thousand and One. Here, three actors portray young Terry, who struggles with the hardships of poverty and school, while the longsuffering and passionate Inez keeps a firm maternal grip on his arm. I was distracted by Moonlight’s jarring shifts from one actor playing Chiron to the next; they seemed so strikingly different from one another. Here, I believed each chapter: Aaron Kingsley Adetola (playing Terry at 6), Aven Courtney (Terry at 13), and Josiah Cross (Terry at 17) work together almost seamlessly to create the illusion of a young boy defying the odds to become a young man with a promising future. I believe in Terry as a three-dimensional character, trying to trust Inez as she fights to save him from so many traps that doom so many black children in poverty, abandonment, and, eventually, addiction. I find Terry more compelling than Chiron primarily because he’s allowed to be so much more than a victim, more than just a figure for us to feel sorry for.
In fact, every performance in the film feels just right, making this film's time-jumping narrative seem authentic at every turn. And the main event, as critics are declaring with almost unanimous enthusiasm, is the performance of Teyana Taylor as Inez. (A prediction I don't want to make: Teyana Taylor's name will be missing from the Oscar nominations, and that's going to be hard to take.)
Taylor commands our attention every time she’s onscreen, covering the film’s substantial span of years from 1994 to 2005, a short history heavily accented with details about what New York’s mayors claimed about their city and what was really happening on the streets.
As we watch Inez assert influence in Terry’s life, steer him toward success in school, and struggle with the risks, rewards, and costs of coaching her boyfriend into becoming the father figure that Terry needs, the actors and the film’s dilapidated textures of the film’s mise-en-scène create an absorbing drama in an entirely believable world.
Until, alas, the narrative’s startling final turn. In the last act, Rockwell's cinematic imagination gambles on a revelation that is meant to astonish us and break our hearts. And perhaps it will work for you. It does not work for me—not because I find the twist implausible. (On the contrary, I find it very easy to believe.)
No, the problem is that the film has not felt like a typical crowd-pleaser drama, or like a movie rigged to win Oscars… until suddenly it does, with late-breaking surprises that come to us in heavy-handed dialogue. A Thousand and One has done a decent job of showing instead of merely telling until that point. I just wish the last chapter could have been revealed more imaginatively, more cinematically, in ways that allowed us to participate and connect certain dots ourselves.
You know how cheated you feel when a TV detective in a poorly written murder mystery reveals the big Whodunnit and HowTheyDunnit, and you're like, "Well, we didn't have most of that information, so what have we been doing here all this time?"
I feel a little like that at the end of this thing.
Still, that’s the only complaint I have about a movie that I still wholeheartedly recommend.
A Thousand and One casts a meaningful spell. It takes us on a journey with characters we won’t forget. And it tunes our attention in such a way that we will look a little differently at our own city streets. We will listen a little differently when it comes to news about the extra resources that Black Americans need in order to break out of cycles of poverty that are not, and have never been, their fault.
Kore-eda's Monster keeps us guessing
An early draft of this review was originally published on December 21, 2023,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
You've heard this line: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
Typically, if you Google those words, you discover they've been attributed to all kinds of wise writers, including Plato. (Most probably, they first came from the author and minister Ian Maclaren.) Whatever the truth might be, I'd argue that, going forward, those words should be linked to a download of filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda's Monster, which is one of the most absorbing dramatizations of that wisdom I can think of. Every single character in this movie is fighting a hard battle, and very few of them ever learn what their neighbors’ battles are really about.
For the last 30 minutes of this film, I was increasingly worried that the tangle of tragic storylines would be resolved in some far-too-convenient way, something that would feel contrived and disappointing.
Just so you know — that doesn’t happen. Not at all. The way it does resolve may have you wishing, after the fact, that they had contrived some easier, more satisfying resolution. This is a heartbreaker in so many ways, and it will leave you with just as many questions as answers.
Kore-eda is doing some of the best work of his impressive career here, reminding us that he may be the world’s best director of child actors. His youngest actors here are every bit as affecting as the adults, delivering delicate and nuanced performances.
He did this most effectively in 2004’s Nobody Knows, a film that often replays in my mind two decades later for the harrowing emotional ordeal the audience experiences watching a family of young children try to survive their mother’s sudden disappearance. In 2018, as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was earning global accolades and setting a tremendous precedent for international cinema at the Oscars, Shoplifters was quietly moving audiences to tears and, for me, standing out as an even more affecting work about a family scheming their way to survival at the poverty line. Let’s not talk about The Truth, his first venture outside of South Korean storytelling, which starred Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, and Katherine Deneuve—an intriguing misfire. He came right back with Broker, and my heart melted all over again.
Monster is more challenging than any of them, in that it shows us the same central events several times from different characters’ points of view, and the spans of timeline covered in each point of view varies, leaving us scrambling to figure out how the stories line up.
We first follow the story of a widowed mother, Saori (Sakura Ando), as she tries to figure out whether or not her grieving son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) is telling the truth about being bullied by his fifth-grade teacher Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama). She is achingly sincere and devoted to her son’s well-being. But what do you do if the school administration seems uncooperative, even though your boy has come home bleeding and claiming that he’s been told that his human brain was replaced with a pig’s brain? Both Ando and Kurokawa are win our hearts, if not our heads, right away.
Then, we get the story again, this time from the point of view of Mr. Hori. And very quickly it becomes apparent that things are much more complicated than we thought. Hori is socially awkward, his body language unsettling, and it is rumored that he’s been a customer at a local “hostess bar,” which goes up in flames in the film’s opening moments. Is Hori innocent of his students’ accusations of abuse? Did he draw blood? Are we going to have to choose sides in this dispute?
Hold on — there is still so much more to learn: from the point of view of the school principal (Yuko Tanaka), who is still shaking from a trauma that left her with excruciating secrets; and from the point of view of Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), a preternaturally resilient and cheerful boy who is a magnet for bullying by his classmates and his abusive father.
If that doesn’t sound like enough drama for one movie — and it should be — just wait. There’s a natural disaster coming.
If I were reading this review, I would be skeptical that this will add up to an unbearably contrived and melodramatic film. And maybe that will be your experience. I see that some of my favorite critics find it too convoluted, too frustrating, and too intent on moving us with shocking twists. One even compared it to the notoriously lurid web of storylines in Paul Haggis’s Crash!
I don’t know — it worked for me. In Crash, everything felt like it came with a hashtag of a hot-button social issue. I suppose you could pin social-commentary hashtags on these storylines too. (I won’t say which ones, as that would involve heavy spoilers.) But I believe in these characters; I’m moved by these performances; and as I find myself frequently horrified at how complicated dramas at the school where I teach are oversimplified by those who aren’t getting what they want, I feel deeply invested in each character’s struggle to cope with hardship and their crucial need to see a bigger picture.
I care about Saori’s maternal anguish and moved by her dedication to her son. I’m unsettled by the plausibility of Mr. Hori’s Kafka-esque nightmare. And I can hardly fathom the principal’s private heartache. But the movie’s most compelling storytelling comes in its attentiveness to these two young boys, Minato and Yori, who are being forced to grow up too quickly, who are dealing with so much loss at home, and who now have to face violence within their school and further injustice stemming from ignorance of the adults who, while they’re earnestly seeking to help, have missed too many essential details to understand the nature of the children’s suffering.
Here's to Kore-eda, the master of filmmaking about children. I don't know that any of his films since Nobody Knows twenty years ago have inspired in me such deep empathy for the children we see onscreen, which has the meaningful effect of strengthening my curiosity and attentiveness to young people around me.
As a matter of fact, when the movie began I was already greatly aggravated by the ongoing commentary of two young boys who were sitting behind me, to say nothing of the constant sound effects of their vigorous snacking. What were they doing here, by themselves, plowing through bags full of snacks and talking about their friends and their phones at a movie that will not typically show up on the radar of boys their age?
But as the film continued, and I became more absorbed by its braided dramas, I simultaneously found my aggravation dissolving and turning into curiosity. Could it be that I started caring?
Later, when the film took a stronger interest in the secret lives of the boys onscreen, I heard a few stray comments from the boys sitting behind me. One of them asked his friend why in the world he’d chosen this movie. The other said he’d read about it somewhere, and that he thought it was based on a true story. (I haven’t found any evidence of that, but the plausibility of the plot’s conundrums has much to do with why the film is compelling.) This sharpened my curiosity, and the more I listened to their interactions, the more I became convinced that one of them had very strong, very personal reasons for his attraction to this film. I can’t say more without revealing plot spoilers. Suffice it to say that this is a film about secrets that seem too scary to reveal, and when we feel lonely in the burdens we carry, we will be drawn to stories about others in similar circumstances. Art can help us bear heavy hardships by comforting us with, at the very least, a sense that we are not alone.
And while I’m still wrestling with some questions about how Monster’s storylines intersect, and where exactly each character has ended up by the end, I’m going to be thinking about their heartaches for years to come. I’m going to think of it whenever I’m meeting with a student whose sufferings I cannot decipher, and whose future seems to be largely in the hands of the adults who have to make decisions for them largely on guesswork. And I’m going to be thinking about the two boys who sat behind me in the theater, and the fact that at least one of them felt so personally invested in the film. I’m going to wonder if the two of them are still friends, if their friendship has what it takes to survive the challenges they will have to navigate.
It's allergy season, and I'm allergic to Godzilla
An early draft of this brief review was originally published on December 21, 2023,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Based on what I’m hearing from Godzilla fans, and even from some who would call themselves “kaiju-indifferent,” Godzilla Minus One — the 37th filmic footprint in this monster’s cinematic history of destruction —feels more like Godzilla Scores 100. In fact, one of my good friends and fellow educators wrote to me, raving that it’s “one of the most powerful stories of grace and redemption I’ve ever seen.”
It’s December, and that means I’m prioritizing world-class cinema. This is the time of the year when the most celebrated films from recent film festivals are opening in America in hopes of scoring Oscar nominations, and I’m suddenly scrambling to keep up with the highly praised features screening in Seattle. It felt strange to choose a Godzilla movie — especially since I’ve seen very few of them. (I enjoyed 2014’s edition, directed by Gareth “Rogue One” Edwards — as you can see from my Letterboxd review.) Could this one be the second film in the tradition to overcome my skepticism?
Written and directed Takashi Yamazaki, who also oversaw special effects, Godzilla Minus One is remarkable in how it preserves what has always been the sturdiest elements of the franchise — scenes of metropolitan chaos, a monster who looks like a guy in a suit smashing up skyscrapers, a nation throwing the full weight of its military forces against the gargantuan threat, and a helluva lot of specifically Japanese post-WWII anguish. In doing so, it leans heavily on Steven Spielberg’s Jaws for inspiration, and a pivotal sequence riffs on Nolan’s Dunkirk without apology.
The human drama focuses on Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who deserted at the end of the war when it was clear that Japan was losing. Hiding out on an island outpost under the pretense that his plane needs repair, Kōichi witnesses Godzilla rise from the sea and attack his outpost like the first wave of post-war shame. When the moment comes for him to try and save them, he falters. Thus, the table is set for his character arc: He will make it back to the mainland to learn that his parents are among the casualties of Tokyo bombings.
Overwhelmed by guilt and a drive to make up for his failures, he befriends a spirited young woman, Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe). Noriko has been similarly orphaned, and they dedicate themselves to the care of an orphaned child, Akiko (Sae Nagatani).
Their new life as a family trying to rebuild in the ruins is short-lived. Kōichi will join Japanese forces who gather and scheme to face a new threat from Godzilla. The creature, growing exponentially as a result of U.S. atomic-bomb testing, is now threatening the mainland with new size and strength, ready to storm through a cityscape like the reptile version of a hurricane. What’s more, he has a new weapon: a heat ray reminiscent of the planet-killing power of the Death Star. Kōichi will feel compelled to defeat his shame by fighting the monster again, determined to hit his target this time.
I’ll admit it: I’m envious of audiences who love Godzilla movies. It’s such beautiful evidence of the power of art — even formulaic, crowd-pleasing entertainment — to create community and provide catharsis. I wish I felt that way about this particular tradition.
When I was a kid, the idea of Godzilla fascinated me because I was excited about dragons and monsters. But whenever I actually saw Godzilla scenes, I was disappointed. The monsters in the stories I loved had complex parts to play in those stories. Godzilla, by comparison, just walked out of the ocean, roared and smashed things, and then went back. He bored me. And the forgettable and often disposable human characters did not help matters. (For many of the same reasons, I never found professional wrestling the slightest bit interesting.)
The only director who has made me excited about a Godzilla movie is Gareth Edwards. In 2014, he took the Godzilla template as an opportunity to maximize mystery in plays of light and shadow. Even the trailer was visually enthralling. That movie was a perfect example of the Ebert principle: I was engaged not by (let's all sing along) what the movie was about, but by how it was about it.
So many Godzilla connoisseurs are heralding this new one as "the greatest since the original" or "the greatest of all time." And I'm sure they have good reasons for those claims. I gave my afternoon to this beast, and while I can acknowledge some impressive craftsmanship and some honest-to-goodness soul-searching—clearly, our storytellers are reflecting on ways in which the wartime Japanese government set a tone for the devaluing of human life across the culture—I cannot say that I found the human drama particularly compelling. In a genre like this, where characters are drawn cartoonishly, and where actors turn everything up to "11" as a rule—as if every scene must have a moment that is underlined, all-capped, yellow highlighted, and shouted hysterically—I find myself backing away. These characteristics aren't unique to this film; they're the Godzilla conventions. And fans love those conventions. I just happen to be allergic to them.
So, I showed up. I gave it my attention. I thought about Japanese wartime and post-war history. I puzzled over the “Hey, we can Dunkirk too!” scene. I acknowledged the focus on redemption and grace, even as I cringed that the conflict was resolved with violence rather than something more imaginative. I applauded, impressed, by some of the extravagant special effects. I saw all of the "surprises" coming as clearly as those sailors with binoculars saw Godzilla's spines rising from the water in the distance. And I returned to my day without giving the movie much more thought.
I'm happy for everyone who enjoys it.
And here's to the one of the four other people in my huge theater — specifically, the guy who didn't turn his phone off. Surprise, surprise— it rang! But what's remarkable was the timing: It happened smack in the middle of the long hold-your-breath silence at one of the film's most climactic moments. And, I kid you not, it was the same old obnoxious ringtone that we once heard go off inside the belly of a Jurassic Park T-Rex. Come on, man. In this instance, I wish Godzilla could lurch out of the screen and swallow the phone, the person, and their squeaky Regal Cinemas recliner.
Haynes hits a tense, hilarious high with May December
An early draft of this review was originally published on December 12, 2023,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
As my friend and I paid for our tickets to see director Todd Haynes’s new film May December at my neighborhood theater, the ticket-taker shared, as if divulging a secret, that some of Mary Kay Letourneau’s family had been there the previous day to watch the movie and judge its accuracy.
I suppose that’s possible. Schoolteacher Letourneau’s crime of raping one of the 12-year-old sixth graders in her class, which made her a star of tabloid headlines, took place just south of Seattle.
Still, I worry about anyone who buys a ticket to May December thinking it will offer them any insight into those actual events. The screenplay — the first feature for Samy Burch — is a work of fiction only very loosely inspired by the Letourneau scenario. Burch turns the fundamental details into… what, exactly? A complex psychological thriller? A satire of daytime soap operas? A horror movie? Whatever May December is, it has far more interesting questions on its mind than “How could a sane woman do such a thing?”
I remember recoiling from the gossip-column circus over Letourneau, and I’ve never had any desire to see a movie about such abuse. So I’m writing about May December in search of some understanding: Why is this movie so surprisingly compelling? How is it that a film about such perverse behavior is sticking with me and inviting me back for another look as soon as possible?
The most obvious answer is that May December is the work of an idiosyncratic filmmaker in a state of high inspiration, making something that stands apart from its obvious influences (Bergman’s Persona and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, definitely — and possibly Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria) as a movie without any easy comparisons.
Todd Haynes has been one of America’s most intriguing auteurs since he left audiences breathless with his 1995 psychological thriller Safe, a film that gave Julianne Moore what some (including me) would argue is the greatest role of her career. He also worked magic with her in his Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven (2002). His filmography since then has been hit-and-miss for me. 2007’s I’m Not There has all of the audacity and ambition that any sufficient meditation on Bob Dylan’s shapeshifting career could need; but it felt overstuffed with ideas, as fascinating as they were. 2015’s Carol didn’t move me much, as the period style seemed so lavish and Cate Blanchett’s performance so calculated that Rooney Mara’s more vulnerable and human turn seemed stifled if not suffocated. Haynes was meticulous in his period recreation of 1927 and 1977 in of 2017’s Wonderstruck, but a plot heavy with contrivance and coincidence failed to suspend my disbelief. But more recently, he’s done strong work: I found his 2019 whistleblower thriller Dark Waters compelling, and his band-history documentary The Velvet Underground (2021) formally exciting. (For the record, I haven’t seen his limited-series TV remake Mildred Pierce.)
Haynes’s direction in May December is sly, strange, and surprising; he’s clearly excited by Burch’s inspired twist on a familiar story, how she takes the basic details of Letourneau’s case and complicates them with yet another layer of exploitation. Gracie (Julianne Moore), a former middle-school teacher who has served prison time, has been married to Joe (Charles Melton), her former student — that is, the victim of her abuse — for many years now. They are raising children together—their own, and children from Gracie’s previous marriage. As the film begins, they are welcoming a visitor to their home: Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actress who intends to play Gracie in a feature film, has won Gracie’s reluctant cooperation by promising to prioritize “the truth” over lurid sensationalism.
As Elizabeth studies Gracie and her relationship with Joe, shadowing both of them around their house and their daily routines, she is at first, for the audience, a cipher. We are studying the mystery of this marriage with her, trying to understand how it could possibly work. And we’re unnerved by Gracie and her control-freakish manipulation of her husband and her children. (Can a person be ferociously passive aggressive?)
But it doesn’t take long before the family’s increasing skepticism about the actress becomes our own. Elizabeth’s tactics and true intentions seem murkier the more time she spends with the family. At first, she seems to be trying out various method-acting tactics, copying Gracie’s gestures, practicing her delicate lisp. But she grows increasingly preoccupied with the allure of the seduction story, and with Joe’s boyish qualities — the ways in which he still seems so naive, so pliable, so easily confused. Does she want to play this role because her own judgment is, like Gracie’s, already corrupt? Or is it that the work of “becoming” a criminal character is poisoning her will? Is method acting dangerous?
Soon, we find ourselves conflicted about this intensifying clash of strong-willed women, tangled up in what Manohla Dargis calls “their worlds of lies.” Both women are weaponizing their performative talents to bend others to their will. (And, it’s worth noting, both of them are white, and the characters who they most successfully exploit are brown.) The more we watch Elizabeth working her way into Gracie’s world, the more she seems almost vampiric, enabled by the lingo of professional actors to justify her exploitative and self-indulgent behavior.
And as our suspicions about Elizabeth increase, so does our interest in and concern for Joe, who somehow still seems helplessly and hopelessly immature, ill-equipped to stand up to either woman’s scheming.
Joe is an extremely complicated character, and Charles Melton is entirely convincing in the role, both looking and acting like a teenager in a twenty-something’s body, as if he has somehow been catapulted a decade forward and missed out on essential stages of development — which is pretty much true. He genuinely seems to care about his much-older wife, although his function in the family seems more like that of a caretaker for Gracie than her equal partner.
By contrast, Gracie treats Joe, especially in social situations, more like an older son than a husband, lecturing him, and making condescending remarks about choices almost any adult should be trusted to make. (The fact that she met Joe and seduced him in a pet store is just one example of how the film’s seemingly incidental details have poetic resonance.) Joe is clearly insecure with his role and responsibilities in Gracie’s family, particularly when it comes to her adult children who are just about his age. In his private moments, he exchanges texts with an offscreen character in what looks to be the beginnings of an affair. When he’s not trying to keep Gracie happy or answering extremely personal questions from Elizabeth, he’s committed to a passion project; he’s raising endangered butterflies, strangely obsessed with observing their stages of maturation and the eventual metamorphosis that enables them to take flight. The symbolism here is, in one sense, heavy-handed: Clearly, Joe himself is caged and caught in a sort of arrested development, missing what he needs to grow up properly and spread his wings.
Perhaps it’s that focus on insects that makes me think of Blue Velvet, another film about an outsider following curiosity about a seriously effed-up situation only to find that what he learns is awakening his own perverse impulses. Remember how that film began by showing us a seemingly idyllic neighborhood, but then slowly drew us down past the picket fences and the roses into the soil, where all manner of creepy-crawlies were chewing away at the foundations?
With May December, Haynes returns to the fully immersive horror of Safe while also braiding paradoxically dramatic and hilarious tones — I believe what I’m seeing even as I’m laughing at the outrageousness of the whole scenario.
You’ve probably already heard about how Marcelo Zarvos’s score jump-scares us in the most unlikely moments with the overdramatic bombast of a soap-opera theme. This, too, reminds me of David Lynch films in which Angelo Badalamenti’s themes often complicate scenes with syrupy superficiality. Somehow, this deliberate, distracting artifice only increases the sense that something dreadful is taking place; no matter how often the film nods to the conventions of lurid daytime television, no matter how superficial the banter between the characters, no matter how sappy the music, we cannot shake the sense that wickedness — perhaps many kinds of wickedness — festers beneath the carefully manicured surfaces.
That’s ultimately where Haynes and Burch find their richest path of inquiry: Are we drawn to scandalous stories like Letourneau’s for the same reasons that we are so easily enamored of actors? Is it possible that we make idols of actors because they have found a way to “get away with” bad behavior under the guise of working and seeking the truth? Both Gracie and Elizbeth have “disappeared” into their roles, and thus have ways of dodging accountability for their exploitation of others. To get what they want, they justify selfish behavior by telling others to “grow up”; they attack anyone who questions their judgment; they act like tormented victims when they realize they’re in danger of exposure.
In what may be my favorite scene of 2023, Gracie watches one of her daughters try on dresses for a formal event, and she cannot resist making passive-aggressive comments that expose her disapproval — not her disapproval of the dresses, but of her daughter’s body. Meanwhile, Elizabeth pays strict attention to Gracie’s body language, mimicking until she’s like a mirror image of Gracie, modeling the surface while evincing no objection to the implications of Gracie’s behavior. I couldn’t help but think of how this scene, like the scene in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla when Elvis critiques his underaged dream girl’s preference in dresses, makes obvious allusions to Hitchcock’s famous department store scene in Vertigo. What’s more, I think this scene is choreographed brilliantly in front of multiple mirrors to tease us with questions about who is being genuine, who is pretending; who is real, and who is just a reflection. It’s the best trick shot with mirrors I’ve seen since one involving Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, and this one is far more complicated than that.
Altogether, May December is a masterclass in complex composition. Christopher Blauvelt, who also filmed Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, Autumn de Wilde's extravagant Emma., and most of Kelly Reichardt's films including this year's Showing Up, makes this the most visually compelling film I've seen all year, bringing long takes alive with such layered surprises that I wanted to turn around and see the film again as soon as the credits rolled. That filmography is a dazzling array of unique styles. Blauvelt has quickly become one of my favorite cinematographers working today.
All of these aspects — direction, screenwriting, acting, score, and cinematography cohere to elevate what could so easily be merely salacious and pulpy melodrama and make of it something richly cinematic, playful, and meaningful. I think it will speak most powerfully to viewers who have had to contend with passive-aggressive families or communities, or who have been exploited into serving others’ agendas. Those viewers will be quick to discern how Joe’s world is bound up in barbed-wire fences that keep him — and Gracie’s children too — trapped under Gracie’s control. Similarly, the film will speak to those in the arts who are familiar with the all-too-common vocabulary used by artists to avoid accountability and excuse dangerous behavior: their “search for something true,” their endeavors to “serve the character.”
Speaking for myself, I find poor, miserable Joe to stand at the center of the film’s deepest concerns. Gracie’s manipulation has cost him so much that he is struggling late in life to discover who he might really be, what he might really want. His preoccupation with saving endangered butterflies reminds me of how, as a teenager, I came to recognize how my own community’s codes of behavior were largely shaped by fear and by vanity. I found escape in literature, music, and movies, seeing within those mirrors reflections that revealed the falsity in so much of what I was taught. There was a beauty there that spoke to my longings, that showed me what was missing in my life. In art, I found a path to freedom and authenticity. And at the end of May December, I’m hopeful that Joe, for all of the ways he’s been abused and scarred, might yet find a way out.
It's too soon for me to say it's my favorite Haynes film, but I can say with conviction that May December is the first film I've seen in 2023 that felt like a completely new experience — one that constantly surprised me, reminded me of nothing I'd seen before, and gave me that delicious thrill of I have no idea what will happen next. And I can’t wait to see it again.
The great Nicolas Cage shows up for Dream Scenario, but is the movie worthy of him?
An early draft of this review was originally published on November 27, 2023,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Diamond rings and all those things
They never sparkle like your smile
And as for fame, it’s just a name
That only satisfies you for a while…
You say you hunger
For something you can’t get at all
And love is not enough anymore…
If I was king for just one day
I would give it all away
I would give it all away
To be with you…
— Thompson Twins, “King for a Day”
For a movie about the world’s most uninteresting man, surrounded by a supporting cast of even less interesting characters — yes, I realize that’s a contradiction, and nevertheless it’s true — Dream Scenario sure plays around with a lot of interesting ideas!
Dream Scenario, the A24 Flavor of the Month from writer and director Kristoffer Borgli, is a wise and witty satire about America’s cultural obsession with “going viral,” the fleeting and fragile nature of fame, and the cost of being a household name if the public turns against you. For starters.
This ultimately underwhelming psychological thriller follows a frustrated academic, Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage). Paul suffers from a sort of mediocrity that makes him a not-so-innocent bystander on the stage of life. He’s a ho-hum husband, an extremely uncool dad, a sort of “blank” in a world of exclamation points. His lack of agency doesn’t just make him uninteresting; it makes him annoying. He’d be lost if it weren’t for his longsuffering spouse Janet (Julianne Nicholson), who seems to still love him for who he is. Otherwise, Paul shuffles through every day yearning to be admired by his daughters, longing to be respected by his colleagues, and dreaming of being recognized for his studies on the psychology of ants. And he gets… wait for it… antsy when another academic infringes on what he considers his intellectual territory.
But it’s hard to be celebrated for one’s publications if one can’t find the will to sit down and start writing. And, like another character Nicolas Cage played in Charlie Kaufman’s provocative Adaptation, this avatar of Kaufman-esque insecurity and awkwardness just can’t bring himself to compose the pages that might finally put him on the Map of the World’s Somebodies.
In my creative writing classes, we always get around to talking about “the Story Spine,” an elementary formula that can be identified in anything we recognize as a story. There’s the situation: the “Once Upon a Time…” line. There’s the normalcy: the “Every day…” line. And then comes that most important moment, the thing we call the Inciting Incident. It’s the line that says, “But one day….”
The Inciting Incident of Dream Scenario, the big idea that sets the primary drama in motion, is this: Inexplicably, Paul starts appearing in everyone’s dreams. Everyone’s. His face is the face of an enigmatic dream epidemic. And he’s catapulted to global fame almost overnight. Fame for doing… nothing. He’s just suddenly everywhere.
It’s a great twist, a brilliant premise for the age of memes and TikTok influencers. Paul is recognized by everyone, his world is turned upside down, and he’s appearing on talk shows. Why? For doing next to nothing. For appearing to do something. His bored and despairing students suddenly find him interesting.
What comes next in the Story Spine? A sequence of steps that we call “And because of that….” Each of these steps represents a chain reaction set in motion by the Inciting Incident, a series of ripple effects and consequences leading to the inevitable step that we call “Until finally…” when everything reaches a point of resolution or collapse.
One of the most significant “And because of that….” steps in Dream Scenario is this: Slowly accepting and them embracing his fame, Paul starts looking for a way to exploit the moment: He scrambles to secure a cart (that is, a book deal) that he can place before the horse (that is, any actual writing). Maybe Paul’s moment has finally come.
And who can blame him? Let’s face it: We all want to be seen as special. We crave the flattery of positive attention. Here’s his chance, in the spotlight on the world stage, to reveal what he really has to offer.
But we also know that for every cultural idol who has earned our respect and admiration, there are a hundred more who have become household names for reasons that are questionable at best. Has Paul prepared properly for the moment? Does he have something to offer?
And there’s another dangerous question on the table: It’s no secret that a lifetime of good work can be flushed down the cancel-culture toilet if the X-Ray of media attention discovers (or fabricates) a celebrity’s character flaw. As Suzanne Vega sings, “When heroes go down / They land in flame / So don't expect any slow and careful / Settling of blame.” Is Paul a person built to survive the searing scrutiny of global fame?
Michael Cera — perfectly cast in view of the fact that he’s often chosen to play human “blanks” — plays an opportunistic marketing agent named Trent. (Because it’s spelled kinda like… “Trend,” I guess?) Trent is the first marketplace predator to pounce on Paul’s unlikely “influencer” potential, hoping to sign him to advertising deals with a cola company. Of the film’s many “moves” to score points of social commentary, this may be the sharpest, making us think about how many celebrity spokespersons we listen to per day, and wonder why we find any merit at all in their endorsements of anything. (I write this as another pizza commercial with Shaquille O’Neal is playing on my TV.)
Paul doesn’t want to become a spokesperson for anything. He wants to be known for who he actually is and what he actually cares about. But nobody is really interested in either of those things. Love may be attention — thank you, Lady Bird — but not all forms of attention are love. It takes Paul a while to realize that people are only interested in him for a couple of reasons: For some, he occupies the spotlight they crave for themselves. For others, his fame represents a kind of currency, and they want to find a way to cash in. I’m reminded of the wisdom of that clear-eyed seashell in Marcel the Shell With Shoes On: There’s a difference between an audience and a community. Paul has stumbled into one, when he needs to do the work necessary to play a meaningful part of the other.
Wow — on paper, this sounds like such a great movie. Kristoffer Borgli has so much of what he needs here to deliver a great film.
First, he has such a promising premise. He sends Paul along a narrative trajectory rich with opportunities to mirror back to us our own complicity in the absurdities of pop-culture exploitation. Paul enjoys the kind of fame that most TikTokkers’ dream about. But then, he ends up suffering the worst kind of consequences that most fame-seekers ignorantly risk… and many, unfortunately, find. Media spotlights can glorify those who seek them and those who accidentally stumble into the glow. But they can also burn the same “lucky winners” — great artists and soulless opportunists alike — into ash in a moment, whether they have made a mistake that deserves such judgment or not.
At its best, Dream Scenario drives us to ask important questions:
- Do we really want to be famous? What do we want to be famous for? And what purpose do we hope that fame will serve?
- When we look around, do we see fame bringing true health and human flourishing to the people we admire? What does living in the spotlight cost a person? Are we ready for that?
- Wouldn’t it be better just to do good work consistently and quietly? Do we really want to run the risk of bankrupting our whole life’s work and the security of our loved ones, inviting a plague of dehumanizing surveillance?
Secondly, Borgli has one of Hollywood’s most recognizable marquee names in the lead role. Nicolas Cage may be the perfect star for this part, given that his career has been a rollercoaster of the highs and lows of fame. He’s had top-billing in prestige pictures. He’s won an Oscar. He’s had romances and breakups that have been tabloid cover stories. His media history is one of achievement and embarrassment. But we can’t escape the question that comes with any new Cage movie: Which Cage are we going to get? The one who just shows up and cashes in? Or the one who does the work?
Good news: Dream Scenario stars the Great Nicolas Cage. For more about 90 of the film’s 105 minutes, Borgli serves up a sequence of intriguing scenarios, but they only work because of Cage’s creativity. Given the challenge of playing someone who isn’t interesting, Cage does something interesting with every single scene. Since the comic performances that made him famous in the late ‘80s, his flair for hilarity has only returned on rare occasions like Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, and Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans. But he’s as surprisingly funny in Dream Scenario as he was surprisingly dramatic and endearing in 2021’s Pig. Let’s get him yet another Oscar nomination, Academy!
Julianne Nicholson, playing Paul’s longsuffering wife, is lovely. (I’ve been a fan of hers since Tully way back in 2000, and I’m still reeling from her fierce performance in Mare of Easttown.)
But that’s where the good news stops. The supporting cast, given half-cooked characters with nothing interesting to offer, aren’t given much of an opportunity to make memorable impressions. And it’s not for lack of talent: The film squanders the presence of Tim Meadows (who isn’t allowed to be funny?), Dylan Baker (who isn’t given a single interesting moment to play?), and Shithouse’s Dylan Gelula (whose character, in a more talented screenwriter’s hands, might have stolen the show?) I’m most frustrated to find Amber Midthunder, so kinetic and compelling in 2022’s excellent Predator prequel called Prey, given nothing to do at all except make half the audience say “Wait—why do I recognize her?”
Perhaps the most surprisingly disappointing aspect of the film, given that it’s from the studio that gave us The Green Knight and Everything Everywhere All at Once, is that Borgli doesn’t conjure a single compelling image. I wouldn’t call Dream Scenario “a bad dream,” but it sure is a bland dream. If anyone finds images from this movie memorable, it’s because a situation is interesting, not the way that it’s captured. We get a shot of crocodiles cornering a young woman; another of a girl suddenly levitating; a few of Paul viciously attacking people; another of young man being stalked by a blood-red devil. And yet, while the prospect of creating these images must have seemed exciting, none of them — not even the one in which David Byrne’s giant suit from Stop Making Sense makes an appearance — are particularly striking or suggestive. Very few filmmakers know how to achieve a truly dream-like “surreality” — and I don’t think Borgli has David Lynch’s number in his iPhone contacts.
Thus, moviegoers are likely to come away from Dream Scenario talking about Cage or offering their various takes on the film’s obvious zeitgeist commentaries. But it’s the pictures in motion pictures that make the most lasting impressions. And on that count, what Dream Scenario could have been is something we can only dream about.
And yet…
As underwhelmed as I am by the last fifteen minutes of Dream Scenario, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. So much of what it reflects back to us about our own fame-obsessed culture is worth taking to heart.
In my twice-annual sessions of Imaginative Writing, my intro-to-creative-writing class at Seattle Pacific University, I occasionally encounter a student who has decided they want to “be a writer.” They tell me about their favorite books or screenplays — usually popular franchise stories with adjacent movies and games. They tell me they tried to register for my Advanced Fiction Writing class, but discovered that the Intro course was a pre-requisite, and so they’re jumping through this inconvenient hoop. What they’re really interested in, they say, is getting published.
Experience has taught me to smile, be respectful, and quietly insist that the introductory course is not just a hoop to jump through. My writing classes are about learning and practicing the disciplines that lead to strong writing: craft exercises, freewriting, ambitious reading, small group workshopping, and revision, for starters. These will help them discover that writing can be a richly rewarding way of life — an abundant and meaningful life! — whether or not it leads to publication. (I love Annie Dillard’s anecdote in The Writing Life about a writer who was approached by a student and asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sentences?’”)
Publishing? That’s a whole different subject. I remind my students that a whole lot of terrible writing gets published, and a whole lot of great writing is rejected by 70 publishers or more before it finds a home… if it ever finds a home. I tell them about the five year span in which I wrote five books under contract, and how they were some of the most stressful and punishing years of my life, nearly burning me out as a writer. They blink, and it’s clear to me that I must sound like one of the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. They’re not really hearing me. Their mind is already made up: They’re in love with the idea of being known as a writer, and not at all ready for the rigors of writing. Most of them have no idea what that involves. (Hint: Malcolm Gladwell wasn’t far off when he wrote about “the 10,000 hours.”)
Within a few weeks’ time, these students who have decided to be writers tire of actual writing. And it turns out that the stories they felt so compelled to tell were just a grab-bag of familiar twist-ending formulas: “My narrator was dead the whole time! Surprise!” “The protagonist dies of a car accident at the last moment — nobody saw that coming!” “The food they were eating… it was people!” “Surprise! The whole thing was just a dream!”
Perhaps I sound cynical. I’m not. I find impressive writers in these classrooms too, and sometimes one of those ambitious, career-minded dreamers actually turns out to have real talent. I just graded a stack of revisions in creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, and I recognize those who are likely to write for the rest of their lives: They are enjoying the work of revision. I’m always willing to be surprised.
What troubles me are not the ambitious, career-minded students. What troubles me are the forces that so often shape their expectations and their preoccupations with a fast-track to fame. They don’t understand just how dangerous our desire to be recognized, celebrated, and validated can be. Attention, like any exciting drug, can become an end in itself and distract us from meaningful work. It can cost us our privacy. It can cost us our friendships and families. It can test our integrity. Typically, these dreamers don’t realize what it takes to win a cultural spotlight, much less to sustain that kind of attention once you have it. They don’t know what can happen when the heat of pop-culture glory hits you and reveals just how much — or, more likely, how little — you’re ready to offer. And they forget that the simple fact of being a fallible human paints a target on your chest, so that simple stumbles that used to be incidental have become an invitation for public condemnation and scorn.
https://youtu.be/q3x9iUL-74w?si=cso28RYJcgLAphqK
We’re surrounded every day by famous figures like Dream Scenario’s protagonist who have become popular for frivolous reasons. But even those who have earned their way to fame by their meaningful contributions to society are vulnerable when they stand before a fickle and mercurial public. In an ideal world, audiences would focus on the work, not the maker. “There is no such thing as an artist,” writes Annie Dillard in Holy the Firm. “There is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?” What a world it would be if we heeded those words and gave up this circus of celebrity nonsense. But that’s not the world we live in.
During the few years in the late 2000s when all of my publishing dreams were coming true, and I was thrilling at the sight of my own books at the front of Barnes & Noble bookstores, something happened to me. My relationship with writing changed. I became much more focused on engaging audiences, much less focused on the writing itself. And I nearly collapsed chasing every opportunity to promote the books, marketing and marketing, doing interview after interview, scrambling to try to sustain the momentum of potential. I wrote more hastily, more desperately, as the demands of the Machine took more and more of my energy and attention.
In Dream Scenario, Paul hasn’t even begun to do the academic writing that he wants the world to know him for. But it’s not just his writing — or, rather, his dream of writing — that suffers. He’s also failing to live up to his potential as a father, as a husband, as a member of a community. The hype of his success is filling up his life with even more nothingness. Perhaps if he were a human being first and a celebrity second, he might have some actual wisdom and work to offer when this almost-arbitrary spotlight of celebrity finds him.
That may not be the wisdom that Dream Scenario intends to impress upon us. (To be honest, given the film’s rather haphazard conclusion, I’m not exactly sure what the film ends up hoping we understand.) But it’s the wisdom that has me replaying the film in my mind.
Merriam-Webster has chosen the word authentic as the 2023 Word of the Year. And it’s a word that seems to me to be at the heart of Dream Scenario’s questions. Yes, Paul Matthews has gone viral. But does he have what it takes to do something worthwhile with that attention? Does he have what it takes to stand strong if and when the audience turns against him?
If that merciless spotlight ever swings back around to me again, I hope I’m wiser. I hope I’m prepared to make something more meaningful of the moment. And if it doesn’t? That’s just fine with me. It’s probably for the best.
The Holdovers lives up to its name
An early draft of this review was originally published on November 12, 2023,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
“You might try The Holdovers,” I heard myself saying to one of my former students who stopped me in the hallway to ask for a film recommendation. I’m not a big fan of Alexander Payne’s films. I find that his work tends to zigzag between off-putting cynicism and a sort of desperate sentimentality. But there’s a lot to enjoy in this one.
“I saw the trailer,” the student replied. “It’s about a professor, right? At a boys’ school? So, it’s like a new Dead Poets Society?”
I don’t remember what I said. (I was on my way to class, in a hurry, as usual.) If I’d had time, here’s what I would have said:
The Holdovers certainly feels like it could be taking place in the same world as Peter Weir’s classic boys’ school drama. Dead Poets was set on the campus of a Vermont school called Welton; The Holdovers is set among the traditional brick buildings of a New England boys’ school called Barton.
But the contrasts are more interesting than the similarities. Dead Poets took place in 1959, as Elvis was on the rise and The Beatles were about to blow up the pop culture world. Counterculture was about to challenge and change American culture’s strict norms. The Holdovers, by contrast, takes place in 1970, and the boys of Welton are fighting to avoid madness, trapped in a world prescribed by their controlling parents and an even more controlling patriarchal academy full of faculty who grumble about the death of culture.
The narratives follow arcs that are thematically complementary but hierarchically flipped: Weir’s film is about an unconventional teacher (played by the unconventional Robin Williams) who challenges tradition and champions creativity, poetry, and passion. Payne’s film is about a maddeningly legalistic classics professor (played by the wonderfully curmudgeonly Paul Giamatti) who, stubbornly rooted in tradition, butts heads and locks horns with students who would challenge him to become more creative, more spontaneous, more open-minded. The pioneering teacher of Dead Poets clashes with his institution in hopes of saving his students from cultural suffocation. The old-school prof of The Holdovers… well, he is the institution — so much so that even his colleagues might recommend he be institutional-ized. He’s the one who needs saving.
For the first hour, the story unfolds as a three-strand braid, following characters stranded on campus during the holiday break:
Giamatti’s Professor Hunham, his casual conversation as peppered with Latin phrases and literary allusions as his lectures, staggers around the corridors “babysitting” the titular “holdovers” — the boys who have nowhere else to go. It’s clear that his obnoxiousness is a front for some kind of deep hurt, but the nature of that burden won’t become evident until the trials of this purgatorial season wear him down and expose the wounds.
One of the stranded, a smart but obviously wounded young man named Angus (the very impressive newcomer Dominic Sessa), hates Hunham as much as the other students. But he’s quite possibly the most observant and mature of the bunch. And before long he’s testing his intolerable supervisor’s patience not so much to punish him as to figure out what makes this grouch such a monster. (It’s obvious that Angus, too, is destined to reveal dark secrets.
Meanwhile, both Hunham and Angus are fed by Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the head cook and administrator of the school cafeteria. The source of Mary’s hurt is obvious: Her young son was the only Barton boy sent to fight in Vietnam, lacking the privilege and prejudicial protection of the majority. Mary’s discernment is as sharp as any of her kitchen knives; she sees through Hunham’s bluster and she knows what Angus needs.
(I cannot deny that filmmaker Chad Hartigan has hit the nail on the head in his Letterboxd notes about this one: “Da'Vine Joy Randolph gave an electric, star-making performance in Dolemite is My Name that didn't get her a sniff of awards attention but as soon as she plays the help in a white people movie the Academy is gonna take notice.” [Sigh.] How long, O Lord, must we sing this song?)
Over the course of their brief but torturous (and snowbound) detention on campus, they will have no choice but to cope with one another. What they do choose, however, is surprising: Hunham tests the electric fences that pen him in. Hunham chooses to loosen his famously unforgiving standards as he begins to care for the young man. And Mary will give her grief something to do: She’ll provoke Hunham to emerge from his shell and start discovering the world through the frame of the television. What’s more—she’ll support Angus in pursuing what he really needs. Their conversations and collisions will lead them on episodic adventures: to a hospital emergency room, to a bowling alley, to a Christmas party, and beyond.
The farther they go from their campus routines, the more they learn about each other’s secrets, and, well… the more the movie begins to test our patience with a sequence of shamelessly tearjerking scenes that feel less inclined toward literary integrity and more inclined towards easy crowd-pleasing. It’s bound to be the kind of movie that earns a bunch of Oscar nominations but then quickly becomes just another title on Payne’s hit-and-miss IMDB record.
Yes, unfortunately, The Holdovers really lives up to its name. It keeps us at least 15 minutes too long — I might go so far as to say 30 — and I counted at least three moments where I might have faded the film out, subtly and quietly. But Payne keeps prodding it further, as if he’s never quite satisfied with any of these understated moments but wants to go for the Oscar-moment jugular, concocting some kind of confrontation that will push all the right buttons.
And that’s a shame, because I enjoy the world he’s crafted here. It’s a film critic’s responsibility to recognize this aesthetic as an homage to 1970s Hal Ashby classics, right down to the folk-song interstitial flourishes. (Damien Jurado is a surprisingly effective stand-in for Cat Stevens — so much so that we didn’t really need an actual Cat Stevens number, but we get that anyway.)
But Ashby films always remain rebellious enough, earnest enough in their anti-establishment impulses, to avoid ever surrendering to corporate influence. And Payne’s film feels anxious about achieving heavy buzz, and so it ends up reminding me even more of early '90s Oscar bait like Scent of a Woman, scenarios that build toward a character taking an heroically moral stand in a moment of extreme pressure, something to make us cheer and cry.
Come to think of it, Dead Poets does this too, but it does so in a way that leaves us uncertain about the consequences. For all we know, several of those boys will get kicked out of school. And Robin Williams’ Mr. Keating might get hit with lawsuits. By contrast, The Holdovers ends a little too neatly for me,
Sideways remains the only Alexander Payne film where the tension between cynicism and sentimentality has mostly worked for me (and even that movie has a scene that I count a jarring, ugly misstep into cruel caricature). This movie errs in the other direction. It never feels dangerous; instead, it feels a little too sentimental.
But I'm inclined to say this one is still worth seeing for its playful homage to a very specific slice of cinema history, for its three lead performances, and for a few very good scenes that come before those last, long 30 minutes.