First Reformed

First Reformed (2018)

Dir. and written by Paul Schrader

Starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Phillip Ettinger, Cedric Kyles

          I honestly don’t know if this is a good movie or not. I think it is; I can definitely pick out things about it which are very finely crafted, aesthetically smart. But frankly I’m just too close to it to be able to objectively talk about it like a piece of art. More than any other movie I can think of in recent memory, maybe more than any other movie I’ve seen since I was a teenager, FIRST REFORMED feels like a movie about me, a movie which captures the world as I see it, which tries to wrestle with the particular horror of modern existence as I experience it. It is as close to seeing my own mind on-screen as I have ever experienced in a movie. If it has flaws, they are also to a large degree my flaws, and if it has strengths, they are to a large degree my own as well, at least intellectually (and the movie is almost exclusively interested in the intellectual). To give it any kind of objective evaluation would be to appraise my own mind, a task which, much as I wish it were otherwise, I am uniquely ill-suited to attempt. Suffice to say, then, that I found the experience of watching FIRST REFORMED absolutely shattering, and, perhaps selfishly, I think you might too. At the very least, if you watch it you might understand a little better who I am. That may not be much of a recommendation, but it is the one thing I can offer with any real certainty.

         I am not, like FIRST REFORMED protagonist Ernst Toller, a priest, nor, like writer/director Paul Schrader, a Calvinist. But I am very much Ethan Hawke. Not literally, of course, but I identify with the actor in a way which is very unusual for me. Despite being an American male of European ancestry, I’m an odd duck in a lot of ways, and don’t frequently see much of myself* in fictional characters. When I do, I tend to see the worst in myself rather than the best (the pathetic, self-sabotaging grifters of BUZZARD, the delusional, desperately needy Chuck Barris of CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND). But in many of Hawke’s characters over the years, I saw at least aspects of my better self that I encountered nowhere else. Being about ten years older than me, he was playing teenagers when I was a teenager, which is, I suspect, the period of life when we’re most apt to look to fiction for versions of ourselves, or at least ideals of what we could aspire to. Suffice to say, at a crucial moment of my development as both a cinephile and a person, Hawke embodied the kind of cool I wanted to be: intellectual, passionate, edgy, troubled. He combined the sort of rebellious, independent spirit that late-gen-Xers like me were drawn to, but tempered with an intellectual seriousness, a restless sense of curiosity about the world and an eagerness to experience it, that I found uniquely well-suited to own sensibility and aspirations. I was never going to be Sylvester Stallone, but cultured, thoughtful Jesse Walters from BEFORE SUNRISE? Maybe. Hopefully. Someday. At any rate, here was a character, and an actor, in whom I could see, if not myself, at least the self I wanted to have.

         And these years later, I still find a lot to admire in the actor. He’s had an interesting career, eschewing the easy mega-stardom that was probably within his reach in favor of more eclectic roles, from Richard Linklater experiments (BOYHOOD, WAKING LIFE) to gritty crime flicks (TRAINING DAY, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD) to straight-up genre fare (DAYBREAKERS, SINISTER), and in all this time I’ve never once seen him phone it in. Highbrow, lowbrow, he is a rare actor you can always count on to give 100%, even in something as ridiculous and schlocky as 24 HOURS TO LIVE or the MAGNIFICENT SEVEN remake.

        

I bring all this up for two reasons: first, as far as I’m concerned, it’s always a good time to remind the world that Ethan Hawke is a God damn national treasure. Second, and more germane to the topic at hand, I feel it’s necessary to emphasize the degree to which he has remained stable my whole life as perhaps the only celebrity who represents a kind of person who I could meaningfully aspire to be. Because in FIRST REFORMED, we find him again playing a character with whom I identify to a striking degree. And that’s a real problem for me, because Schrader considers this film to be part of a loose trilogy, along with TAXI DRIVER and LIGHT SLEEPER. Those are great films, but not films featuring protagonists that anyone sane wants to personally identify with.

         Of the three, FIRST REFORMED’s Reverend Toller initially seems the odd man out. He’s got a stable (if somewhat austere and limited) life, working as a priest in a 250-year old New England church which is attended by a few parishioners, but mostly exists as historical landmark. Toller takes his liturgical duties seriously, but it’s clear his role as a priest is largely symbolic, and he’s really being retained as a caretaker and tour guide (his responsibilities include stocking the gift shop) for the old building, which is owned by a nearby megachurch and is itself primarily used for symbolic occasions, one of which is the building’s upcoming 250-year anniversary. Though Toller is outwardly functional, his obsessive journaling reveals that internally he’s a miserable husk, languishing in a self-imposed exile from the world as penance for pushing his son into the military, where he died during the Iraq war. Struggling with alcohol and hopelessness, Toller has been desperately, obsessively searching arcane religious writings for… something. Some reason to hope. Something to believe in. Some way forward. But he can’t make himself believe any of it.

        

His quietly imploding world of personal despair is interrupted by someone looking to him for the very thing he can’t seem to find for himself: hope. That would be Mary (Amanda Seyfried, JENNIFER’S BODY) the pregnant wife of environmental activist Michael (Phillip Ettinger, COMPLIANCE, BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99), a man so pessimistic about the future of the human race that he thinks bringing a child into a world of such dismal prospects is in itself an amoral act. Mary hopes Toller can talk him out of his bleak worldview, and though Toller doesn’t think he’s up to the task, and even suggests she might be better off seeking help elsewhere, he reluctantly accedes to talking with Michael. Unfortunately for him, Michael’s despair is very much rooted in hard fact. He’s spent his life trying to save the world, only to see it sink deeper and deeper into ruin in ways which are specific and quantifiable. He has graphs and charts, a mountain of data that supports his prognositations of doom. Toller is an intelligent guy with the usual stock of religious apologia, but as much as he enjoys this rare opportunity for a lively intellectual discussion, he privately knows that Michael is right, and there’s nothing, ultimately, that he can say to overcome the simple fact that all available evidence seems to point to despair as the most logical reaction.

         And this realization –or perhaps, this crystallization of what he already knew, on some level—inexorably pushes Toller to think about his own role in all this. And a problem of this dire scale is a dangerous notion for a man with nothing to lose to dwell on.

         This scenario, then, has, in some ways, a very similar shape to Schrader’s most famous and celebrated screenplay, 1976’s TAXI DRIVER: again, you have a guy with nothing to anchor him to society faced with an infuriating injustice that the world seems incapable of even noticing. But there’s a key difference between them, and it’s the heart of why this movie was so particularly shattering to me. It is, simply, that Michael, and subsequently Toller, are simply right. TAXI DRIVER’s Travis Bickle is a psychotic, a deranged obsessive outsider whose fixation is rooted in his own alienation, and spurred by the perverse extremities of human corruption which transform the world around him into a lurid grotesquerie. But Toller isn’t any of those things, and his world is a much more mundane, veristic one. He’s depressed and guilt-ridden, but there’s no question that he’s also a functional adult, a thoughtful, intelligent guy not in any way inclined towards cheap fanaticism or radical destructiveness. And the villains of his story are depressingly banal; they’re not exaggerated monsters, in fact their very evil flows from how reasonable they are, or at least believe themselves to be. Toller’s boss at the megachurch (Cedric “The Entertainer” Kyle[!], THE ORIGINAL KINGS OF COMEDY) is a well-meaning, friendly guy who seems to genuinely care about Toller’s well being. But he has a huge organization to run –an organization that likely does a lot of real good in the world!—and it needs funding and structure, and that means cooperating with, rather than challenging, the avatars of social and economic power. In fact, doing so looks like sanity to him, looks like what a reasonable, responsible figure of authority ought to do. And that means Toller’s stubborn, disruptive moral crisis looks like instability, if not outright derangement. And the truth of it is, it is instability; it’s exceedingly inconvenient for someone so invested in the system to have some kind of earnest idealist poking at its foundations. But Toller isn’t crazy; he’s unhappy, isolated, unstable… but he’s sane. It’s the world that’s insane. And in an insane world, a truthful, sane response looks like madness.

I mean, let’s just talk it out, here, shall we? We have a moral imperative to future generations, to the continued existence of life, right? And if we encounter people actively and selfishly working to destroy that future, we have a moral obligation to oppose them, right? And if they use their ill-gotten bounty to seize power and prevent us from opposing them within the system they can set up and manipulate to their advantage, our moral obligation doesn’t simply end there, right? We still have a moral obligation to take action to affect real change, to do everything which is within our power, especially in the face of a scenario as grave as the current one, right? Even potentially at the cost of our own lives? If there’s a moral argument that lets us off the hook, I’ve never heard it. And yet, this logic has led us to some extremely troubling possibilities. If we follow the values we claim to believe in, it brings us inevitably to somewhere we don’t want to go. But if we shrug them off and tacitly admit that we never really believed in them to begin with, what does anything mean?

That’s the thing about FIRST REFORMED which, at least to me, feels so gutting. I can’t think of another work of art which feels so honest about how hopeless the world is. Which is to say, there are plenty of dismal, hopeless movies about the inevitability of suffering, but this one comes by that hopelessness is a uniquely intellectual way. There is no obvious weakness in Toller’s logic, there is never any point where you can argue he’s missed something or has other options. (vague SPOILERS follow) If he believes what he professes to, then the only two options are either the one he takes or the one Michael takes; the “best” option the film offers, and the one it ends on, is maybe he just gives up and tries to live a happy life and not think too much about the stuff he claims to believe in. (End vague, minor SPOILERS)

In short, any sort of intellectual honesty about our responsibilities to the world leads to a miserable selection of impossible solutions. It’s the perfect microcosm of the inescapable dismal logic of my life so far, and the reason I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a fictional character that I so profoundly saw myself in. I’ve struggled with this very dilemma myself, and my continued existence is less a testament to my successful moral reckoning than my cringing willingness to dodge these questions and retreat back to the simpler comfort of living my own small life. But that solution comes with its own sort of fatalist emptiness, a willed myopia in the face of total hopelessness that anything can be done to save humanity from itself. We’ve come too far, it’s too late now. This gets worse and worse from here, and all we can do is watch it all fall apart and try and cling to our tiny lives and try to put it out of our minds as much as we can.

 

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(END SPOILERS FOLLOW – read only once you’ve seen the movie) And indeed, it’s on that very note of dissatisfying uncertainty that the movie ends. And it’s an appropriately jarring ending which suddenly swerves away from the fatalist TAXI DRIVER climax it seems to be headed towards, instead settling into something much stranger and more mysterious. It builds to the perfect apocalyptic pitch of inevitable tragedy… and then, suddenly, a little glitch throws the whole thing off. Toller has gone too far now to turn back, and yet suddenly he can’t go forward. It’s a beautiful evocation of how life can disrupt our plans, even when we’re at our most certain.

(END SPOILERS CONTINUE – read only once you’ve seen the movie) I mean, as upsetting as Toller’s solution is, it’s also very much a relief to him; he’s miserable anyway, and this is a chance for an escape as much as it is a strike against the evil of the world. He’s finally at peace, he finally has purpose, finally has some hope that he can do some good. And then, just as he’s reached the point of no return, the situation shifts and he finds his certainty that he’s doing the right thing colliding head-first with his deep care for another person. It’s an absolutely irreconcilable situation; his conscience won’t let him do what he was planning, and yet it’s the only thing left that he can do. The only thing to survives that paradox has nothing to do with philosophy or conscience, it’s just his simple instinctual need for human connection. Something innate, immediate, physical, far removed from both thought and consequences, but no less inescapable, though it’s something he’s spent the whole movie trying to escape. It’s strange and awkward and confounding, and that’s just how life is. Certainty is easy, but life has a way of turning your most ardently held philosophy into hopeless chaos.

(END SPOILERS CONTINUE – read only once you’ve seen the movie) Which brings me back to my own life again – a selfish thing to do in a movie review, I know, but something I can’t bring myself to avoid in a movie which feels this personal. I’ve always used this blog as more of a journal than a catalogue of artistic merit, and with this particular film there’s no escaping it, my reactions are too intrinsically linked to my own struggles to separate them out and pretend this is in any way an objective discussion of a film. I relate so intensely to Toller’s philosophical free fall because I’ve lived it. I think I can say without false modesty that I’m a guy who desperately wants to do the right thing (regardless of how rarely I manage to do so), and that the only approach to that goal that I ever understood or related to comes through rigorous intellectual inquiry. Other people relate to things more empathically, and I think that’s good and necessary, but it’s not what I’m equipped for. Rational analysis is the only way I know to make sense of the world and how we’re supposed to live in it. I think Toller would probably describe himself the same way, and that’s why I see so much of myself in his complete disarray at the end. When a person like this follows what seems to be an irrefutable logical argument to a conclusion which gives you a rare sense of certainty and purpose, only to find that it brings you to an impossible, unworkable scenario… it’s destabilizing on a level that’s hard to even describe. I suspect it’s somewhat akin to suddenly losing your deeply held religious faith. You go through a period where everything feels like some kind of giddy, nonsensical dream. You feel panic, desperation; every action you take feels random and out of your control. You want to die, you want a sign, you want something to resolve it all, you crave that apocalyptic sense of self-destruction that was going to wrap everything up so neatly. 

But nothing ever comes, and then you just keep waking up every morning, and finally you have no choice but to do the hardest imaginable thing, which is to just keep living. The end of FIRST REFORMED is the best portrayal of that mental journey I’ve ever seen on screen; it captures the abruptness of it, the frustration, the uncertainty rushing back in all at once, and, most of all, it captures the infuriating open-endedness of a desperate question which doesn’t have an answer. When you find out that you’re actually going to have to live, even though you don’t want to and don’t have any clue what you’re supposed to do about that. It’s strange and disorienting and awkward and beautifully unfinished. 

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Very few works of art can support a vision that bleak, and almost none ever try to reach that emotional point through intellectual rigor instead of emotional manipulation. I doubt it’s the best way to reach most people, but to me, watching this felt like having my guts ripped out. And yet, I’m not sorry that I did. It’s a relentlessly miserable, despairing film, and yet I emerged from it feeling oddly comforted. In a funny way, as hard as it was to watch, I felt a little less alone after seeing it. I’ve already been through this, lived through it, fought through it, maybe even self-indulgently wallowed in it. I know this terrain intimately and deeply. My demons are already all-too-aware of the litany of despair which FIRST REFORMED inventories, and they emerged from the experience without any fresh ammo, but perhaps somewhat cowed to be dragged out in the open with such vividness and empathy. Neither Paul Schrader, Reverend Toller, nor I have managed to wrestle an answer out of the hopeless paradox of existence, but having fought through it with them, I feel a certain spark of camaraderie. If I still don’t understand, there’s a certain succor to at least feeling understood.

*Which should by no means be taken as an argument against greater diversity in film; if anything, it should be read as an argument for more. Thousands of cis white male actors and I still find it astonishing when I see one who I actually feel some personal identification with. Imagine how a trans Indonesian plumber or someone must feel! We need more stories told!

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

Zama

Zama (2018)

Dir. and written by Lucrecia Martel

Based on Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lola Dueñas, Matheus Nachtergaele, Juan Minujín

ZAMA is a curious, quiet little period piece which is so subtle and unpushy that I didn't entirely realize it was a comedy until maybe halfway through, and didn't realize it was a horror movie for a while longer, though in retrospect it's very much both, albeit in the most dry, deadpan, and existential iterations of those two genres possible. It's the story --or, perhaps, the anti-story-- of Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, CRONOS and WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, beyond perfection in a role which requires him to paradoxically overwhelm the audience by underplaying everything), a minor Spanish official in colonial-era Paraguay, desperate to be transferred out of this rural backwater, but miserable enough to be unable to avoid self-sabotage before that can happen.

The primary tone, then, is one of crushing stagnation, the slow-motion horror of being gradually buried alive in a thousand tiny setbacks. For the longest time, the movie is basically the DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOIS set in 18th century Paraguay, with Zama's many pathetic attempts to escape his miserable purgatory perpetually offering a brief flicker of hope before leaving him even worse-off than he was before, his stockpile of hope emptied just a little further. The movie wavers close to out-and-out absurdism in the litany of indignities it lavishes on its milquetoast protagonist, piling up his woes so gradually that they barely register until they reach critical mass. Gradually, though, the comic insults begin to add up in wilder and wilder ways (he's forced to move into a haunted hotel at one point!) while the style of the film remains as blithely reserved as ever, resulting in a disconnect which is at once very funny and quite existentially disturbing. The sense of escalation is gradual, but as irresistible and flattening as a glacier, and by the film's end things begin to spiral out of control in increasingly blunt, visceral ways. Indeed, the final section (the film, reflecting the apparently excellent 1956 novel it adapts, is really three mostly self-contained chapters) suddenly plunges into a vivid, desperate jungle nightmare that I'm required by law and tradition to compare to AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, finally paying off the first two acts' gradually escalating sense of human-crushing chaos while losing none of the film's quiet potency.

All throughout, director Lucretia Martel (LA CIENAGA, THE HEADLESS WOMAN) maintains a disinterested reserve, as though the camera barely finds Zama interesting enough to bother following him, instead peering curiously around its protagonist into the world of colonialist horrors barely noticed by him, but which can hardly fail to disturb a modern viewer (most notably the ubiquitous enslaved native Paraguayans, who the story and characters completely ignore but the camera finds pointedly relevant). Zama, who can't even control his life, barely manages to stay at the center of his own story, with Martel's unfussy deep focus shots and vivid evocation of a bygone world (which is, perhaps, not so alien to our own as we would like to believe; note the thoroughly modern musical choices) filling in the ellipses of the go-nowhere narrative with a rich, endlessly fascinating tableau of life.

Martel has made only three other movies, all of which seem to be highly esteemed, but none of which I’ve ever seen. They’re definitely on the list now, though; I mean look at this lady. I like her style:

A little research suggests that she’s most known for her caustic, deadpan satire at the expense of her native Argentina’s bourgeois upper class, and you could certainly read something of that into ZAMA, if you were so inclined. There’s something very revealing about the film’s ostensible focus on Zama’s stagnating ennui in the face of the shocking brutality going on all around him. He’s a laughingstock, yes; but our chuckles at his expense catch in our throat when we see the horrors of the system this man is casually supporting. That he is completely and utterly ambivalent to that system pushes the discomfort even further; it would be appalling but comfortingly comprehensible if he were a fervent believer, but to see such a vacuous, indifferent man perpetrate such horrors with halfhearted disinterest is singularly chilling… and easy to relate to. Zama isn’t an actively cruel man; he’s too consumed by bored self-pity to take sadistic pleasure in having slaves whipped or natives executed. Instead he barely even notices. The savagery he’s taking part in doesn’t even register in the face of his all-consuming moping. And are we really so different? The period setting merely allows Martel to quietly push the audience to notice the cruelty of a system that daily life inures us to. If Zama were a modern-day bureaucrat disinterestedly crushing the poor and vulnerable with the faceless, impersonal power of the state, we probably wouldn’t even notice it. We’d take at face value that his wounded self-esteem really is what the movie finds interesting. Because he would look like us. 

 Anyway, my real point here is that the movie contains some of the best damn llama acting I've ever seen in my life. I mean, this fucking lama has enough charisma to make The Rock look like Ryan O’Neal.* Poor Daniel Giménez Cacho gives the best performance of his career, and still gets upstaged by an errant llama (you'll know it when you see it). Perfectly fitting, I guess, for this particular vision.

*Here you go. 

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

Widows

Widows (2018)

Dir.  Steve McQueen

Written by Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn

Starring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya

I doubt anyone would have expected director Steve McQueen to follow up his 2013 Best Picture-winning 12 YEARS A SLAVE with an adaptation of a 1983 British crime-drama TV series, transplanting its plot to 2018 Chicago. And I most sincerely doubt that even someone who managed to guess all that would have predicted that the screenplay would bear the unlikely credit of “written by Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn.” And yet, in just a few moments of screentime, it all makes perfect sense. The obvious explanation is that McQueen intends to use the contemporary setting and diverse cast as a means to examine social, racial, and political structures. The less obvious explanation is that he also intends to make a tight, tense, procedural crime thriller, and considers this not only to be an equally important goal, but a necessarily symbiotic one.

This is certainly not something I would ever have guessed he would be interested in, but here we are, and it’s certainly a better world for it. Frankly put, WIDOWS is a goddamn masterpiece of carefully-crafted crime fiction with the added bonus of doubling as a closely observed survey of modern American socio-political stratification and dysfunction. And even with all that ambition, it’s resolutely unpretentious and completely unafraid of trashy genre conventions, never pandering but equally never failing to entertain. Freed of the weighty responsibility he had in making one of only a handful of American movies to ever directly address slavery (and based on the real-life memoirs of its protagonist, no less!) McQueen feels more unpredictable and eclectic here, more willing to follow his artistic muse as it wanders freely amidst the cultural detritus of modern American* culture, from the profound to the pulpy. And wander it does, through quite a lot of plot; the titular widows are Veronica, Linda, and Alice (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Elizabeth Debicki) who are forced to turn to crime after their criminal husbands (Liam Neeson, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Jon Bernthal, respectively) get themselves killed in a botched heist, leaving their spouses in serious trouble with another local gangster (Brian Tyree Henry) who wants two million dollars from them to fund his campaign for alderman of a South Side Chicago ward, a race he’s running against a reluctant legacy candidate (Colin Ferrell) with problems of his own. And if that’s not enough characters for you, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Kaluuya, Garret Dillahunt, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Robert Duvall, Lukas Haas, Matt Walsh and Kevin J. O'Connor are in there too.  

That huge cast of characters is, of course, the result of its origins as a mini-series, and as an adaptation thereof (the second adaptation, in point of fact; there was already an American version in 2002!) it does have the slight sense of something more sprawling and episodic which has been edited down to its bare bones. But McQueen dances between diversions so confidently that it simply feels epic, rather than disjointed. If it’s all over the place, it’s because it’s trying to tell the story of a whole city, with a million separate moving parts, all of which are important and all of which are an intrinsic part of the whole. In fact, if anything, the movie’s biggest problem is that its 130 minutes are so tightly packed with rich detail and curious digressions that it’s full of things we wish we had more time to explore. Michelle Rodriguez’s character, for example, doesn’t end up with quite enough screen time specifically devoted to her to entirely emerge as a fully-defined character. And you could probably edit her out of the movie, or combine her with Cynthia Erivo’s character to create a sleeker screenplay. But then, you’d miss out on the fascinating scene where she shows up at the house of a frumpy, middle-aged mark who she needs to surreptitiously pump for information, only to discover they’ve both recently experienced a tragic loss, and then fumble her way into a spontaneous and ill-advised makeout session! This is a wild, live-wire little bit of plotting which could easily descend into campy overkill in the hands of a lesser director, and throwing it in without any particular narrative necessity or specific denouement would be recklessly playing with fire for any director.

But McQueen is not just any director; in his hands, this scene becomes a perfectly fascinating little zen koan, a short story all of its own, equal parts illustrative and mysterious. Does Rodriguez do this cynically and strategically, as a ploy to try and put this guy off-guard? Does she do it defensively, as a disruption that affords her an escape? Or does she do it impulsively, as these two characters from completely different walks of life suddenly find themselves powerfully, magnetically intimate due to their shared grief? Is it none of these things, all of them, does she even know why she does what she does? The movie isn’t telling, but just this one scene is rich enough to inspire hours of thoughtful reflection.

In that same vein, please find also the most singularly and surprisingly compelling on-screen relationship of the year, in the tenuous, unexpected bit of vulnerability which develops between Viola Davis and Elizabeth Debicki. The two women could hardly be more different; Davis is a flinty, self-assured over-50 African-American career woman, and though we can see from the opening that she is clearly still a powerfully sexual being, she is certainly nobody’s idea of a sex object. Debicki, on the other hand, at first seems to be defined entirely by her appeal as a sex object; she’s impossibly, almost parodically tall and slim, with her exaggerated figure, pale skin, blonde hair and huge eyes giving her the appearance of a lab-grown Barbie doll. And a doll is apparently all she’s ever been, having spent her whole life relying on the largesse of criminal (and often violent) boyfriends. These two women seem to have nothing in common; really, their sole shared characteristic seems to be how little either seems interested in making friends. And yet, quietly, around the margins, something develops between them which doesn’t materialize between the other women, who seem to have a strictly business –and sometimes out-and-out antagonistic—relationship. Friendship doesn’t seem to quite describe the situation, but there appears between these two committed survivors an unexpected little note of intimacy, a tiny crack in their mutual armors of ruthless, unsentimental pragmatism. Perhaps it is their very dissimilarity which makes them feel comfortable enough with each other to let the mask slip, even if only a tiny bit; I am reminded of how Werner Herzog managed to break past the natural cultural defenses of his Southeast-Texas interview subjects in INTO THE ABYSS specifically because he was such a complete outsider. Sometimes we can be more comfortable sharing things about ourselves with people who don’t come from the same backgrounds –and therefore with whom we have, perhaps, less to lose—than with people who might otherwise seem to have a more innate understanding of our lives.  

This relationship, in all its complexity and nuance, happens on the margins of the film; tiny moments here or there, adding up slowly and almost subliminally, but it’s a perfect example of how the movie densely packs meaning into its runtime, and masterfully communicates itself without resorting to lecturing. And only a talent as securely confident as McQueen would handle something so lightly which it is absolutely at the heart of the movie (SPOILER: the film even ends with a beautiful grace note centered on the ambiguity of their further friendship – are these women irresolvably creatures of two different worlds, and bound only by the memory of this single shared experience, or are they capable of bridging that gap and recognizing that they have more in common than it might at first seem?) and as such is a crucial facet of the movie’s most intriguing fascination: the ways in which a rigidly divided 21st century America (by class, by race, by gender, by age, by politics, by geography) intersects in unexpected ways. It’s a thesis which is best exemplified in the movie’s most bravura moment, my easy pick for the single most perfect shot of the entire year: a long, unbroken tracking shot of a wealthy politician’s car driving the three minutes it takes to get from the overgrown, low-income apartment complexes where he’s been campaigning to a neighborhood of posh mansions where he lives. It’s the perfect visual and thematic metaphor for the way in which these disparate peoples are both irreconcilably separated and intrinsically connected. What could be better than a movie with that kind of effortlessly virtuosic, immensely thoughtful craftsmanship that’s still a crackin’ good time? If you didn’t catch it in theaters this year, you really blew it, but fortunately you still have a chance to set things right. Before you spend one more dollar on some dull Marvel sequel or godforsaken “live action” Disney remake, you owe it to the culture and to yourself to see this. Relentlessly entertaining while never dumbing itself down, this is the perfect exemplar of what popular cinema ought to aspire to.

*And British culture, as both the original mini-series and McQueen himself hail from across the pond.

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

Cold War

Cold War (2018)

Dir. Paweł Pawlikowski

Written by Paweł Pawlikowski Janusz Głowacki Piotr Borkowski

Starring Tomasz Kot, Joanna Kulig

For a Polish artist born in the 1950s and exiled from his communist homeland at the age of 14, what title could be more auspicious than COLD WAR? Any artist could spend a lifetime examining the topic and never get to the bottom of it. But Paweł Pawlikowski (IDA) is most surely not just any artist, and he aims to do it in a slim 88 minutes, fully an hour less than just part I of AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. He does this by finding the vast within the intimate, focusing not on the corridors of power or the abstraction of politics, but on a brilliantly elliptical, intensely focused portrait of the ebb and flow of the relationship between musician Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and singer Zula (Joanna Kulig), as they navigate both the geopolitical turmoil around them and long-simmering emotional turmoil between them. 

Pawlikowski does not idealize their relationship; if there is a certain undeniable chemistry between them, it’s not expressed in tranquil compatibility, and they’re absolutely never happy together. But the possibility of happiness feels remote to the point of indifferent abstraction here. Their decades-long fractured courtship emerges not as something desirable, but as something primal, inexorable, fundamental and grounding in a world of titanic and impersonal forces constantly shifting and destabilizing the puny mortals gripping onto it for dear life. And it is this instinctual immediacy which grounds their story, which is told not so much as a narrative as it is a quick succession of laconic moments in time, reducing years and decades into crisp, mysterious vignettes that reveal the story’s center in the orbits its gravity produces on our unhappy couple.

It’s a compellingly understated love story --if it can even be called a love story, “a hopeless self-destructive desperation story” having a somewhat less iconic ring to it-- anchored by two outstanding performances from the two protagonists, but transcended by the pure aesthetic beauty of Pawlikowski and cinematographer Łukasz Żal’s haunting black-and-white images, which trap the characters in a curiously boxy, constricted aspect ratio for reasons which are rather obviously symbolic, but no less effective for it. There is, of course, no shortage of potentially symbolic elements here, this being called, after all, COLD WAR, not DYSFUNCTIONAL CODEPENDENT ROMANTIC FIXATION: THE MOVIE. But to Pawlikowski’s enormous credit, it is a character-driven work first and foremost, far more interested in the specificity of these characters and their strange, frustrating journey than in making sweeping generalizations about the historical forces which shape them. If they are to be symbols of geopolitical turmoil, it is because they are so intrinsically shaped by it, not because they exist to symbolically embody it. Their compulsive, self-destructive need for each other is every bit as fiercely real and irresistibly powerful as the relentlessly turning wheels of history which have caught them up. The result is a movie which is every bit as seductive and immediate as it ruminative and abstract, and that in may just be a rather incisive act of political filmmaking in itself.

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

Dir. Jacques Audiard

Written by Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, based on the novel by Patrick deWitt

Starring John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed

All Westerns are fairy tales, and they all say more about us than they ever did about some brief historical period in the Western United States which was mostly defined, as far as the culture is concerned, by the East-coast pulp writers who spun a unique sort of fantasy out of scraps of overheard, imagined and embellished stories that drifted back to them over the years, secondhand. The first Westerns rode by on a quintessentially American fairy tale of rugged masculinity, of potent individualism made flesh in the larger-than-life heroes of that era: John Wayne forcefully ensuring neither Indian nor bandit nor bureaucrat would tell him what to do, Shane confidently riding into town to supplant father and lover alike. Eventually, this took on a mournful tone, casting that fetishization of manly power as a nostalgic reminder of a bygone era; consequently, all subsequent Westerns were not only fairy tales, but requiems. Eventually, when the hollowness of this particular fairy tale began to show through the increasingly threadbare seams, the revisionist Western was born, a new sort of fairy tale for an era where the shortcomings of the old one had become too obvious to ignore; now, Westerns were about demystifying the icons of our fathers' generations, about telling ourselves that the "true story" is a lot more complicated and morally ambiguous than the white hats and black hats of yesteryear would have it seem.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS, along with SLOW WEST and a few other Westerns from the last decade (THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSES JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD, THE REVENANT) have sometimes been called "revisionist Westerns," but I'd argue they're actually something else entirely, maybe even something more honest. While the Revisionist movement tried to ground the familiar genre tropes in gritty, self-consciously unromanticized realism, these movies more openly embrace the mythic nature of the Western, returning to the deeper truth of fairy tales, which have much more to tell us about reality than the gritty reimaginings of old cowboy pulp tales from the late 19th century ever could. Of all of them, though, the SISTERS BROTHERS tells the most complex fairy tale; if the revisionist Westerns tried to sully the clear lines between the black hats and white hats, director Jacques Audiard (A PROPHET, which remains his masterpiece) reimagines the conflict completely, into something whimsical, tragic, and baffling; there is some kind of moral here about the loss of Eden, but it's a slippery, nebulous thing. Characters who seem set up to give us clear moral parables shift subtly as the situation changes, find themselves stranded in unknown territory, and wander onward blindly, eventually emerging blinking into the light, unsure how they came here. 

The setup seems simple enough; we have two titular Brothers (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, looking only vaguely like the same species, let alone brothers) veteran bounty hunters a little down on their luck, sent by a nameless Commodore (Rutger Hauer, RIP, in a wordless cameo) to work with a spy (Jake Gyllenhaal) to execute a penniless (but erudite!) prospector, one Herman Warm (Riz Ahmed) for crimes that are at first not specified. That the movie intends to undermine the seeming simplicity of its premise seems obvious; exactly how it does so is what makes the movie so unique and interesting. 

At first, it seems like a fairly straightforward post-modern gag: Phoenix, the dominant brother, is the archetypal Western hero in the John Wayne mode, a man of masculine power and violence, benevolent but flawed, principled but fiercely independent, a protector, a hero and an outcast. I think it is not overstating the case to say this is the rough shape all true action heroes in American fiction, and Audiard wants us to be acutely aware of it. A character like this is the expectation in a Western, but here he's comically joined by his partner (and older brother) John C. Reilly, nobody's idea of an action hero, an invading force of soft modernity, contrasting our placid modern values against the righteous Old Testament virtues of the genre cinema of the past. Where Phoenix is blunt and confident, Reilly is neurotic and tentative; where Phoenix’s flaws are tragic and dignified, Reilly whines and suffers comic indignities. The joke, it seems, is that Reilly is something of a man out of time, skeptical and uncertain about the rough and tumble world around him that everyone else seems to easily take for granted.

But things are not quite what they appear; after a while, it seems like the movie is making the opposite point, a point I've maybe always wanted to see in a movie: Phoenix’s macho code of violence is basically psychopathy, and Reilly's humble dorkiness is actually a sanity which only looks goofy because men like Phoenix have ruined the world. And to compliment that interpretation, we have the parallel story (which for much of the first half threatens to become the main story) of Gyllenhaal and Ahmed, who stumble together onto a genuinely different way of being, something based in earnest love instead of violence (maybe it’s just seeing Gyllenhaal in a cowboy hat again, but I took their relationship to be more than simple business partners, though the movie is not explicit on this point). The movie, then, seems headed towards a gentle bit of optimism about the possibility of changing ourselves into kinder, more humane beings. But just when it seems like this is coalescing into a clear moral, things shift again, and everything turns topsy-turvy, and we're left with nothing to do but slink away scratching our heads, wondering what it all meant. 

It would be, I suppose, easy enough to accuse a movie which so carefully avoids the expected moral lesson of a kind of lazy nihilism, the sort of offhanded cynicism with which French movies (it’s actually a French-American co-production) so often get stereotyped. But I don’t think that’s the case here; there’s a warm affection for the characters which is evident from the start. I think Audiard would genuinely love to give them all a happy ending, but he also knows that life is random –not even cruel, per se, although that’s certainly always a possibility— and the story you think you’re living doesn’t always arrive at a clean catharsis, the lesson you think you’re supposed to learn isn’t always the one you come away with. Everything becomes complicated and messy and confusing, and who knows what it all means? We tend to think of the past as a simpler time, compared with the endlessly complex, unpredictable modern world, where all our actions ripple out and return in ways we can never wholly imagine or prepare for. THE SISTERS BROTHERS is a good reminder that nothing about the human condition has ever been simple (even their name is contradictory!).

Of course, the (intentional) anti-climax and chatty, journey-not-the-destination structure might be off-putting to some. I suppose it’s probably the result of the film’s novelistic origins; the written word can be a more direct medium to communicate an author’s intentions than cinema has historically been, meaning that a film like this, which doesn’t want to tip explicitly into the avant-garde, is probably more essentially narrative-driven than its written progenitor. It presents itself as being a normal narrative, and then deliberately undermines the expectations it sets up, and I could certainly understand why that would feel disappointing, or even like cheap shot. But at least in this case, with a glass or two of red wine in me, I was able to get on-board with the movie’s uniquely off-beat, shaggy vibe, and it really resonated with me. There’s a kind of fatalistic melancholy here which feels all the more acute for the movie’s generally unflinching, unsentimental tone and refusal to bend itself into the expected lessons. The world can be a hard, confusing place which offers no easy answers and resists our most carefully crafted plans to make sense of it. And yet, there’s no alternative but to just live in it anyway, to keep going forward. It’s impossible, and sometimes horrible, but also sometimes kind of beautiful, if you stop to pay attention to it.

On hand to remind us about that beauty part is cinematographer Benoît Debie (LOST RIVER). You don't need a talent like Debie's to make the West look gorgeous, but it sure doesn't hurt, especially in the nifty way he frames nighttime gunfights as eruptions of orange fire in the deep blue-black of the landscape (some people have complained about the garish digital color grading here, but I sort of like how it eschews the usual Western palette of drab earth tones by turning the landscape into a candy-colored wonderland). The incisive, almost minimalistic score (by Alexandre Desplat, Wes Anderson’s go-to guy, but obviously most notable as the composer for VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS) also packs a big punch, though in the movie’s typically unpushy way, and does much to lightly suggest its weary, vaguely mythic tone.

The craft on display here is certainly indisputable, but it doesn’t seem like most reviewers connected to the movie the same way I did. It’s certainly understandable; what’s an audience to do with a film that isn’t really a drama, or a comedy, or an art film, or an action film, but has little streaks of all four shaped into a narrative which just rises and then withers on the vine? To a lot of people, it seems to have added up to a whole lot of nothing. To me, though, it seems deeply, even painfully, evocative of my particular time and place in history. It’s not a wholly nihilistic film; in fact, it’s a film which very much wants the best for and sees the best in people. But it’s also a film acutely aware that this is a world full of good ideas that die random, ignoble deaths, good people trapped in a cycle of doing bad things, good intentions which are not the right intentions for this particular moment. Evil doesn’t usually prevail, but then neither does good; only chaos and entropy can be counted on consistently in a universe that cares neither for our souls nor our values. Obviously one need look no further than the front page of a newspaper to learn this lesson, but there’s something about the way that Audiard blends that sense of mournful hopelessness with the classic American iconography of a Western that feels poetic and poignant, both deeply admiring of American idealism and moral rectitude and simultaneously clear-eyed and despairing of how naive and brittle it all is.

We'd like to have a journey with a clear purpose, a moral arc that lets us tell a story to give it all some meaning. We’d all like to live by a code, to be the hero, to be upright and uncompromising, self-sacrificing, independent, ultra-competent, powerful but benevolent.  We’d all love to be John Wayne, we’d all love to be Shane. But of course, they never existed, they were just a fairy tale, a fantasy we told ourselves about what we wanted to be and maybe ended up believing a little too much. There's a sweetness to that aspirational fantasy, but also something stifling, even dangerous in its ignorance. We're not John Wayne; even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne, he was just some prima donna actor, another American huckster peddling a comforting lie. We are not mythic heroes; Instead, we’re all John C. Reilly; unfulfilled, undignified, uncertain, groping blindly towards doing, if not the right thing, at least hopefully not the wrong thing either, and maybe --maybe-- a few times in a lifetime, seeing some kind of profound truth, some kind of divine path, only to watch it slip out of our grasp before we can put ourselves upon it. And when that happens, what are we left with but to trudge home, older and more broken but barely any wiser than before, towards that dim hope of simple human comfort. And maybe just a little bit of beauty along the way.

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?