Movie Enthusiast Issue 40
Welcome back! I took a short break to wait until I could send a robust newsletter rather than keep to schedule and have nothing to write about. Boy did I pick a week for a hiatus…
I’m sure by now we’re all exhausted with the Harvey Weinstein-related news out of Hollywood. I sure am! I spent the last week trying to figure out the best way to address the story in this newsletter—do I try to summarize everything that’s happened for those who haven’t been following? offer my own commentary?—and settled on sharing three essays by women who have already written about it.
Alyssa Rosenberg has a very good op-ed in the Washington Post that addresses some of the scrutiny around older actresses (Meryl Streep, Glenn Close) who have worked with Weinstein frequently throughout their careers but seem not to have been aware of his behavior, despite how widespread this knowledge was in the industry:
If letting Weinstein buy his way out of sexist pig status with political donations is setting the bar for feminism too low, asking Streep to be a time-traveling sexism avenger is a way to set the bar so high that no one can reach it. Placing a particular burden on women, rather than, say, on the Weinstein Company’s all-male board, to have done something about him suggests this isn’t really about feminist credentials at all: it’s about making women, rather than men, responsible for male misbehavior.
Actress-turned-director Sarah Polley offers her own experiences with the industry in the New York Times and corroborates many of Rosenberg’s points from an insider’s perspective:
Here is an unsettling problem that I am left with now: Like so many, I knew about him. And not just from my comparatively tame meeting with him. For years, I heard the horrible stories that are now chilling so many people to their core. Like so many, I didn’t know what to do with all of it. I’ve grown up in this industry, surrounded by predatory behavior, and the idea of making people care about it seemed as distant an ambition as pulling the sun out of the sky.
And in the New Yorker, the dependably brilliant Jia Tolentino articulates…well, what the article says on the tin: “How Men Like Harvey Weinstein Implicate Their Victims in Their Acts”—
The Weinstein case has reminded me of how hard, maybe impossible, it is to separate yourself from all the things that have been forced on you—an encounter, a body, a sense of complicity, or simply the banal old scripts that make it all seem so sickeningly predictable. You were young and he was powerful; the story writes itself.
I highly recommend reading all three articles, though be aware that there’s upsetting content in all of them.
Moving on…I saw mother! I did not like mother!! Martin Scorsese begs to differ with me:
Before I actually saw mother!, I was extremely disturbed by all of the severe judgments of it. Many people seemed to want to define the film, box it in, find it wanting and condemn it. And many seemed to take joy in the fact that it received an F grade from Cinemascore. This actually became a news story — mother! had been "slapped" with the "dreaded" Cinemascore F rating, a terrible distinction that it shares with pictures directed by Robert Altman, Jane Campion, William Friedkin and Steven Soderbergh.
After I had a chance to see mother!, I was even more disturbed by this rush to judgment, and that's why I wanted to share my thoughts. People seemed to be out for blood, simply because the film couldn't be easily defined or interpreted or reduced to a two-word description. Is it a horror movie, or a dark comedy, or a biblical allegory, or a cautionary fable about moral and environmental devastation? Maybe a little of all of the above, but certainly not just any one of those neat categories.
Is it a picture that has to be explained? What about the experience of watching mother!? It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted — the subjective camera and the POV reverse angles, always in motion … the sound design, which comes at the viewer from around corners and leads you deeper and deeper into the nightmare … the unfolding of the story, which very gradually becomes more and more upsetting as the film goes forward. The horror, the dark comedy, the biblical elements, the cautionary fable — they're all there, but they're elements in the total experience, which engulfs the characters and the viewers along with them. Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I'm still experiencing weeks after I saw it.
Mmkay sure whatever, I really don’t feel like expending any energy explaining why I think this movie is a piece of trash; fair points, all, Marty, but I’ll leave it at that.
With regards to Marty’s claims about film criticism and cinema culture more generally, I was spared from having to churn out any thinkpieces of my own by Richard Brody, who put his finger on one of the problems with Scorsese’s line of thinking. If you were to take some seasoned moviegoers, Scorsese included, at their word, there simply aren’t any good movies being made anymore. That simply isn’t true! It’s too often the case that these folks just don’t know where to look or whom to look for. Brody:
[T]he trend in criticism is the same as in movies: for the most part, the best of what’s available isn’t found in the so-called mainstream. That fact has economic implications, of exactly the sort that are reflected in the Safdie brothers’ extraordinary film “Good Time.” The film was made because its star, Robert Pattinson, who had box-office success and gained his stardom working in an altogether more popular and less artistically ambitious vein, asked the brothers to make a film with him; they then wrote it with him in mind, and his involvement secured the financing that they needed to make it. The best filmmakers are often not getting the checks for directing movies that they might have expected decades ago. (Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are among the major filmmakers who have directed TV commercials in recent years while they were between movies.) It’s exactly the movies that are made on low budgets and put into limited release that are more or less immune to the oversimplifications of grades on Rotten Tomatoes or CinemaScore. It’s hard to imagine that the viewers who are interested in “Good Time” or “Beach Rats” or “Columbus” would be anything but amused by such scores, and that they would be guided by such artificial consensus than by reading reviews by critics whose sensibility they find related to their own.
Speaking of movies and film criticism that aren’t to be found in the so-called mainstream, I had two new pieces published in the last month that I’m quite fond of. First up, I wrote a short review of Columbus, the directorial debut by video artist Kogonada. It’s a really pleasant, quiet film, with a surprising performance by Haley Lu Richardson. I was thinking about this movie again the other day after watching Hermia and Helena, one of the movies Brody holds up as an example of great filmmaking happening outside of the mainstream. Hermia and Helena is certainly…something (it involves a lot of beautiful, loooooooooong crossfades; overlaying text from A Midsummer Night’s Dream onto the film; switching the colors in the image to their negatives without purpose). I will say that the inventiveness on display is quite remarkable, but the ideas this movie has to offer aren’t sophisticated—in fact, if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors, they aren’t even fully cooked. Columbus may have less in the way of formal invention, but the story it tells (both in the text and subtext) is much more compelling.
My other piece you’ve probably already read if you’re one of my more dedicated fans and/or stalkers, but for those of you who haven’t seen it, I wrote a massive essay on Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. I am very pleased with how this piece turned out and thankful that my editor let me write as much as I did on a 3-hour-long film that will be lucky if it makes even $250,000 in its theatrical run.