Movie Enthusiast Issue 61: The Great Post-Thanksgiving Movie Dump (feat. Wisemanpalooza, Widows)
Watching
High School (1968)
Frederick Wiseman’s second feature took him to a high school in Philadelphia. Because of the era, there are lots of items of gee-whiz vintage interest: the home economics class, the mouthy teacher casually belittling one of her students for her “weight problem,” the constant and cursory appeal to Scripture when talking to students about sex (for some reason there are a lot of sex education talks in this movie). In the forty years between when this movie was made and when I was in high school though, enough has remained the same for me to have a weird frisson of recognition while watching it. Wiseman’s choices emphasize the disciplinary side of public education, the generational differences between what older and younger teachers deem most important for their students to learn, and the way that community-building intentions cloud moral judgment—all things I was able to map back onto my own high school years! Wiseman pointedly ends with a scene of the home ec teacher reading at a teacher’s assembly a letter from an alumnus writing home to express his anxiety about parachuting into Vietnam and to offer his insurance back to the school as a scholarship should he not return from the war. “Now, when you get a letter like this, to me, it means that we are very successful at Northeast High School.”
Welfare (1975)
Titicut Follies aside I believe this is Wiseman’s most well-known (and certainly his most well-regarded) film. For nearly three hours, he immerses you in the bureaucratically inefficient and barely humane New York state welfare office. Unlike most of his other movies that I’ve seen, here there are much fewer scenes relative to runtime in total—maybe 30 scenes at most, if you don’t count establishing shots and cutaways between scenes—which means that you get to see conversations and conflicts play out, in real time, for their entire duration. It’s draining to watch people who in some cases haven’t eaten or slept in several days fight to be treated with dignity, whether that means insisting that they receive their welfare checks on time (at one point one of the welfare workers quips, “if you only misplace 2,000 checks a year then the system’s not doing too bad,” or something to that effect) or whether this means restraining their volatile emotions so as not to give the welfare workers any reason to dismiss their case. There is a lot of sitting and waiting and desperation. Thinking back on my own exhaustion while watching this movie, I wonder if this isn’t a more effective way of galvanizing people to care about injustice rather than riling a viewer up to righteous indignation with stirring calls to action. You’ll never forget how you felt watching Welfare, and you’ll never forget that that’s not even the half of it for the people actually fighting for their welfare benefits.
Essene (1972)
This is probably unsurprisingly my favorite Wiseman, a short (86 minutes) movie about a community of Benedictine monks. Only 147 other people have logged this movie on Letterboxd! Maybe I can make my new goal as a film critic to just be this movie’s biggest evangelist. Reading through some of the Letterboxd reviews, I was struck by how so many people approached this movie with a similar frame of reference vis-a-vis religion: ascetic monks, they’re just like us! Well, yes. Why is this a surprise for so many people? Granted, the same holds even among religious people I know. Since, for most of us, monasticism is so far removed from our everyday lives, we don’t have much reason to reflect on why someone would join a monastery or what life in such a community would entail. Thus we stick with our preconceived ideas (which, depending on your cultural context, could tend toward the “monks are especially holy people” side of the things or the “monks are depraved, crazy people” side, if you’re taking your cues from Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life). I do happen to know a few monastics, former monastics, and aspiring monastics, so I can’t say Essene was revelatory in the way it was for some of its online reviewers. It is, however, one of the most peaceful and uplifting movies I’ve ever seen, and one I would highly recommend to anyone, no matter their religious persuasion.
I also saw Wiseman’s latest movie, Monrovia, Indiana, my published review of which is forthcoming. (As soon as I finish writing it—I know my editor is reading this newsletter, I’ll have it to you soon!)
Some Came Running (1958)
Back when she was nominated for an Oscar and making the publicity rounds, Isabelle Huppert in some interview I can’t now track down (I think it was the Hollywood Reporter actress roundtable and who has the time to rewatch all of that) cited Shirley MacLaine in this movie as one of her favorite performances. And how! Everyone else in this movie—starring Frank Sinatra as David Hirsch, an army veteran and writer who comes home to Indiana where his brother, a local business owner who knows everyone’s business, hooks him up with an English teacher whom, honestly, just wants to help David get his short stories published in The Atlantic and doesn’t want to go all in on him romantically too—is acting at maybe three or four registers below where MacLaine is at. I have no idea what she’s doing! It’s kind of a Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook performance, except everyone else is so wooden by comparison that she just rises effervescently to the top and you’re anxious for the movie to get back around to her every time it veers off into some boring tangent about adultery or whatever. At one point she’s eating a hamburger for like 15 minutes straight, at another she’s drunkenly belting out a Turner Layton jazz standard in the background of a scene. Who could possibly care about anyone else in this movie? And yet care we must, if we are to make it through 137 minutes of this Somewhat Serious and Genreless Adult Drama that Hollywood, for better or worse, doesn’t make very much of anymore.
Widows (2018)
I’m coming to the conclusion that I prefer my heist movies not to “say” anything. I just want to have a good time watching famous people rob banks with impressive camera movements. Am I asking too little of the genre? Anyway, I really enjoyed Widows, a movie which takes its sweet time accumulating characters and plot threads and then ultimately not doing much of anything with any of them; as others have said, it’s paced more for a miniseries than a movie, and while the payoff is consequently lacking the journey itself doesn’t waste a second of your time. Anyway, who cares about all of that when you have a director as savvy as Steve McQueen! His camera is always in the right place and he’s blocked this movie out for maximal Tim Thrills. Like, I get it, I’m probably the only person who will walk away from a movie totally satisfied because of that one scene where Viola Davis, in a bold red top (we’re gonna have to do another newsletter where I just talk about Davis’ wardrobe in this movie) goes to meet Widow #4 (Carrie Coon), who goes to answer the door, which has one of those translucent marbled glass windows, and the way that everyone’s arranged in the frame Davis is just behind the glass, audible yet visually indeterminate for like 30 seconds before Carrie Coon opens the door wider to let her in, and it’s just so cool and it serves no purpose other than to make me jazzed enough to dedicate 100 breathless and poorly edited words to it in my newsletter. Basically I’m so easily impressed by directorial swagger in a heist movie that so long as the movie stays in its lane (don’t make me regret the $15 I spent on this ticket!) I don’t care if it forgets to make any Grand Statements about Capitalism or Religion or Race or anything, all of which are on the table in Widows, all of which I could learn much more about from just watching another Frederick Wiseman movie.
In a Lonely Place (1950)
This is easily the best movie I’ve seen in months. But what to say about it? I always find it difficult to talk about movies I think are perfect. Shouldn’t it just be self-evident? We’ve had almost 70 years to agree that Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is a masterpiece, so if you don’t see it then I can’t do much to help you. The one thing I do want to comment on is the way that Bogart and Grahame’s chemistry effortlessly transmogrifies the movie into a screwball comedy for 15 minutes after they first confess their love. It’s all downhill from there, but in that really satisfying way where you don’t mind how anxious the movie makes you because it reassures you that you’re still human after all.
Reading
I did Nora in A Doll’s House on Broadway, and Kristine, the friend, she was played by an Actor’s Studio actress. And it was so difficult for me! And my maid in A Doll’s House was also from the Actor’s Studio. There was a scene where there’s a ring of the doorbell, and the set is such that I’m sitting in the living room, and the entrance is on the other side of this wall, and I can’t see it from where I am. So I hear the door bell ring, but Kristine never comes in to talk to me, and neither does the maid—because these Actor’s Studio actresses, they open the door, and they need to express that they had known each other before, so the maid goes “Ohh!,” and they have to hug and so on, and meanwhile I had nothing to do, because they were doing the Actor’s Studio over there, showing you how cold the outside air is. And a lot of things happen when you are cold, which is rightly observed, but we don’t have time to show all that!
—Liv Ullman talks to Lauren Wilford about acting, directing actors, Ingmar Bergman, and Phantom Thread
Coming Soon
Ang Lee’s next film will be a biography of Taiwanese pop idol Teresa Tang, who died in 1995 at 42.
After Okja, Parasite: Bong Joon-ho’s new movie wrapped production this fall and will premiere next year.
Lucrecia Martel is starting work on her next film, a documentary about Argentine indigenous activist Javier Chocobar.
Oh GREAT: Ben Wheatley is making an adaptation of Rebecca (with Lily James and Armie Hammer)
Mike Cahill (Another Earth, I Origins) is making a sci-fi movie with John Boyega and Letitia Wright (!!)
Mmkay Detective Pikachu looks like a trip but was Ryan Reynolds really the best we could do for the voice of Pikachu?
Monthly Terrence Malick Update
What is Terrence Malick up to this month? Producing a documentary about rapper Lil Peep!