Movie Enthusiast Issue 70: Thoughts on 2019 New Releases
You ever spend what seems like your entire life trying to articulate something and then Mark Harris just comes along and does it in a tweet?
It's fine not to like old movies. It's not fine to blame old movies for the fact that you don't like them. Old movies are a language anyone can learn, but it has to be learned. It's not Spanish's fault that you can't speak it.
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) October 16, 2019
Watching
Non-Fiction (2019)
My experience of working in the media has led me to spend a lot of time on Twitter, talking with other people who worked in the media about things that the people at your day job generally aren’t interested in talking about (or at least being paid to). Non-Fiction, Olivier Assayas’s second-most-recent movie (Wasp Network has been playing film festivals this fall), is a film-length treatment of media Twitter discourse. Juliette Binoche has a role in it as a non-Binoche actress for Law and Order-style procedurals who offers to put another character in touch with Juliette Binoche to record his audiobook. Ha ha!
In the tradition of liberated French intellectuals, everyone in this movie sleeps with everyone else’s partner. None of the characters in question are especially compelling as anything other than mouthpieces for the ideas Assayas wants them to speak into being. Assayas shot it on 16mm film stock that gives a cozy veneer to an otherwise cold film. With no stakes and no interest in resolving any of the possible moral conflicts it sets up, the movie deflates slowly and imperceptibly, like a balloon that’s been left out in the rain days after the birthday party is over. Assayas probably thinks his filmmaking is clever metacommentary on the state of the publishing industry. He’s welcome to think that; let’s see where the funding for his next movies comes from.
The Farewell (2019)
Lulu Wang’s debut film is what 90% of debut fiction I’ve ever read by freshly-minted MFAs tires and fails to be: insightful, emotionally mature, not interchangeable with every other voice on the independent scene. It helps that Wang has told this particular story before and knows it so intimately, so she’s had time to massage the details of her own life into a script that draws attention to Themes without smothering you in them. A few grace notes—the poetry of birds showing up indoors, the slo-mo superhero-esque walk away from the battlefield—clash tonally, and the epilogue ought to have been a post-credits bonus scene.
This movie could be yet another turning point for Awkwafina, who already had a watershed moment in her Crazy Rich Asians breakout last year. She held that movie up with a zany energy that’s sublimated here into finer emotions. Wang’s screenplay certainly is to credit for giving her the chance to develop a character who’s faced with ambiguous and unresolved emotions about familial piety and heritage. Will other directors catch on and give her more of this kind of work? Zhao Shuzhen, who plays the grandmother, has never acted in an American movie before. She’s easily my favorite character in the film, and she gives one of my favorite performances this year. It’s sneaky: the success of the family’s plan hinges upon grandma’s naivety, but the more you dwell on her the less sure you are that’s she’s as oblivious as her family needs her to be.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
I think this movie is good, but I can’t adequately write about it because I saw it in the middle of a manic depressive episode where I kept being intermittently overwhelmed with panic. Whenever those feelings swelled up, something would nearly instantaneously appear onscreen seeming to speak directly to my fear in the moment. (Exhibit A: right as I was gripped with tremulous fear of an imminent death, a shot panned down the side of a house revealing a giant PEACE sign in the window. Whew, okay, not today Satan.) We’ll just let this one remain mysterious.
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019)
You need to be forgiving of everyone, even to the projectionist at the AFI Silver who literally had only one job and couldn’t load the reels right during my 70mm screening of Tarantino’s latest. Technical difficulties at the starts of reel 1 and 2 aside, I can’t imagine seeing this movie any other way. Half of the fun of seeing a Tarantino film (for me, at least) is waiting to see what he’s going to do with his camera or how he’s going to light a scene. There’s such a mythic glow in all those heroic shots of Brad Pitt: removing his shirt, laying the smack down on men who get in his way, or even just, like, standing up dramatically. He’s playing a mere stunt actor in the film, but the contemporary audience can’t not see Brad Pitt, perhaps not at the peak of his career anymore yet still a towering figure who hasn’t lost his capacity to inspire awe at both his beauty and the dreadful violence that body is capable of being put to use for.
Some will complain that the arc this movie takes is a too obvious, but the dread it establishes leading up to what ends up being the pivotal (and, surprisingly, only) scene of extended, bloody brutality kept me, at least, questioning how the final conflict would unfold. I read Olivier Clément’s On Human Being around the same time that I saw this movie and found many resonances between this film and the French theologian’s ruminations on youthfulness, vitality, mortality, and ecstasy. I consider it one of the richest films I’ve seen this year, along with The Irishman (to be written about later).
Ad Astra (2019)
Following The Immigrant and The Lost City of Z, James Gray continues to make movies in the classic Hollywood vein: shot on film, by-the-books three-act plot structure, actors who just act instead of strangling you with Method. This one is easy to recommend on paper: it has pirates on the moon! It has unanticipated space baboons! It has Donald Sutherland as a wizened mentor figure who passes away by the end of the first act, but not before passing on crucial information to the main character! It keeps us waiting to see if Tommy Lee Jones has an actual role in this thing or if they just wheeled him in for a half day to shoot 15 seconds of footage for the S.O.S. video Brad Pitt watches at the beginning of the film!
Like the Tarantino, Pitt’s other big vehicle this year is quite theological whether it knows it or not. Gray is the type of humanist who appears to have studied theodicy just long enough to conclude that substitutionary atonement theories of God are bunk but that there’s something more beautiful out there than mere will to power or suffocating Freudian accounts of our place in the universe. This is a fine intellectual trajectory to be on as far as I’m concerned, though I’m always torn when a filmmaker adopts a virtuous apophaticism that’s divorced from anything outside the individual conscience that would ground their moral sense. Such is modern life, I suppose.
Pain and Glory (2019)
It may have been a mistake to watch Almodóvar’s Talk to Her immediately before Pain and Glory, which I’ve seen described as a capstone in his career. Talk to Her is sumptuous to a fault, whereas it takes Pain and Glory a while before anything visually arresting emerges from the rather flat and uninspiring digital cinematography (though there is an animated Montage of My Physical Pain and Existential Ennui that hooks you early on). Antonio Banderas plays a baldly Almodóvar-inspired filmmaker who reconnects with and remembers figures from his past over the course of the film. The Banderas scenes are intercut with scenes of his character as a boy, and his mom (Penélope Cruz), growing up in a cave and eventually discovering that he’s gay when he’s slain by the beauty of a neighborhood handyman bathing in his living room. (Long story, but the circumstances kind of make sense, trust me.)
Presumably much of this movie is meaningful for audiences who have journeyed with Almodóvar for his 40-year career, or at least more so than it was to me (this was only my fourth film of his, and my third in four days), and certainly not as much as it means to him. Some elements of the story ring a bit too congratulatory, such as when an old lover turns up and has nothing but adulatory praise to sing to Banderas. The old flame’s arrival does provide for the movie’s most poignant scene, though. After sharing a kiss, they demurely resist going further and default to rubbing their noses together. It’s a kind of intimacy between older men that you rarely see onscreen, even among European art house movies that pride themselves on how much (oftentimes too much) they are willing to show you.
Parasite (2019)
IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN PARASITE YET SKIP TO THE NEXT SECTION OF THIS NEWSLETTER! YOU’LL THANK ME LATER, I PROMISE!!
The laws of drama dictate that if you introduce a character in the first act as wealthy, simple and naive, they will be revealed in the second act as cunning, vicious, and monomaniacal. Such is not the case in Parasite, where the wealthy family is no more or less prone to virtue or vice than the poor family who con their way into working for them. After watching an hour of Bong’s raucous upstairs-downstairs comedy, you’re ready for the other shoe to drop. Show us the kinky sex dungeon the rich people have been hiding, expose the wealthy businessman as an immoral Malthusian, show us that the doting housewife is a master actress involved in a long con to string along the poor for her own perverse pleasure. Nope. There’s something terrible hidden below the basement, but in a surprising turn of events the wealthy family doesn’t even know they have a bunker. What makes this movie awesome is how it threads you along for so long on the possibility that something will give, that the game will be given up, that the poor family will be revealed to be at the mercy of a devious screenwriter waiting to spring some larger-than-life twist on them. Terrible coincidences keep piling up, but they happen exactly as you might imagine they would when staggering wealth inequality encourages vice and punishes even the most virtuous of have-nots.
In one of the most powerful moments in the film, the wealthy family’s former housekeeper berates her replacements for squandering their new adjacency to money and privilege on only the basest of entertainments. By contrast, she and her husband were much more grateful for the beautiful things they could find in their master’s house, painstakingly designed by the in-universe architect (and out-of-universe production designer) to foreground the beauty of the world beyond its great bay windows. The housekeeper meets one of the cruelest ends in the film: offed in a sight gag that gets a huge laugh but by lasting just one second longer wraps back around to devastating and sucks the air out of the theater. Like the Tarantino, most of the physical violence in Parasite is contained to the end. Whereas there it’s primarily cathartic, here it’s horrific and drains the soul. Surely things didn’t need to turn out this way? Surely if we just close our eyes and look away we can ignore Bong’s perspicacious foregrounding of the way that an increasingly hostile climate (in every sense of that word) will disproportionately bring ruin on the poor, and the rippling effects their desperation will have further up the socioeconomic ladder? Parasite adheres to a strict BYOH (bring your own hope) policy, because Bong doesn’t have any to offer you. Ad Astra’s “let stick together” humanism might be a place to start, but the world-historical conflicts Bong gestures at require something more properly eschatological.
The Lighthouse
Why isn’t this movie more quotable? Why can’t I remember a single line from it? Oh right, because Dave Eggers wants you to Think about Themes. He should take a lesson from Lulu Wang in how to do so tactfully. It’s a shame that The Lighthouse makes you try so hard to search for meaning among its panoply of symbols—ah! it’s about the futility of the proletariat striving under capitalism! or turn-of-the-century homoerotic repression! or or or…—because it misses the opportunity to let its premise do the work for you. You ought to be able to enjoy a movie where Robert Pattinson plays a frenetically out-of-tune second fiddle to the seasoned cello of maestro Willem Defoe. There’s simply too little space in the script for us to have fun, of any sort; I can’t imagine getting even a perverse pleasure out of this story because so much of it is timed so rigidly, right down to the farts. Visually, the movie and its sets are frequently beautiful to behold, sometimes frightening, too often nauseating. The ideal way to see this is with your roommate, if your roommate is a lifelong connoisseur of Willem Defoe performances, as mine is. Afterward you can ask him, “John, how did this compare?” and he’ll reply (and I paraphrase), “He really topped himself this time. But the secret is, he tops himself every time.” As far as we’re concerned, he’s worth the price of admission.
Much of the film’s dialogue, we are told in the credits, was culled from the writings of Herman Melville and contemporaries. Shortly after seeing this movie, I started reading Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, which really hasn’t been doing The Lighthouse any favors in my memory. Whereas Eggers is more of a tree than a forest guy, Melville is fully alive to his world and every angle of approaching it. There’s no pretension about Melville’s encyclopedic vocabulary because there is simply so much particularity about things that he needs to communicate to his reader. No digression into the build of a ship or the psychology of a minor character or philosophical tugs-of-war are too frivolous to warrant an extra chapter or twelve. In The Lighthouse, everything about Melville’s milieu has been overdetermined by filmmakers who want so badly to breathe new life into the period that they misfire and asphyxiate it instead.
Reading
Nevertheless—
The exteriors of the film, and a small number of house interiors, were shot on Cape Forchu, the south-western extremity of Nova Scotia. The entire lighthouse and outbuildings were built from scratch, avoiding line of sight of an existing lighthouse, built in the 1960s. The upstairs set was built within an aircraft hangar nearby in Yarmouth. Most of the water work was shot in a large, emergency-responder’s training pool, capable of generating waves in varying sizes and patterns, located near Halifax. The remaining interiors, including the tall lighthouse interior, were built and shot in two large industrial spaces in Halifax.
—the cinematographer of The Lighthouse shares how he brought the film’s distinctive look and feel to the screen
Coming Soon
Robert Eggers is crossing the Atlantic to Iceland for his next film, The Northman, to star Willem Defoe and Nicole Kidman. We’ll see if this is more a return to form of The Witch or more of the same.
Attention Dardennes Squad: the first volume of Luc’s diaries were just published in English earlier this year (all right, so that’s not really a coming soon, but where else would this news go?)
Shirkers director Sandi Tan will helm an adaptation of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. They better keep in the part where she has to judge a middle school leg competition (let the reader understand).
As the year draws to a close, I’m starting to plan my contribution to the inevitable Decade in Review Discourse. I want to avoid writing too much—I write so much about movies already!—but I do want to somehow acknowledge how profoundly cinema has shaped the last ten years of my life, as 2010 was the first year I truly started to care about movies. I’ve been finding it more interesting to reflect on movies that were formative for me at the time, instead of pulling hairs trying to make the case that this or that film is “representative” or “enduring” or “one of the best of all time.” Stay tuned…