Friday, June 28, 2024

Brief Thoughts on a New Malick Book

 


I didn’t know about this book (Martin Woessner’s Terrence Malick and the Examined Life [2024]) until I randomly happened upon it at the library a couple of months ago. I instinctively checked it out and have been gradually making my way through it during free throw breaks during the NBA playoffs and other interstitial moments in my life, until I finally sped through the last few chapters today because it’s due back and I want it out of the way so I can focus on material more pertinent to my current project. I have some thoughts about it and when I started typing them out it got longer than a tweet, so I decided to write this little blog post, which because written on a whim will be brief and non-exhaustive. Verdict: the book is O.K. It definitely has a decent amount to recommend to anyone interested in Malick—heavy contextualization of the state of philosophy both in general in the mid-to-late 20th century and specifically at Harvard around Malick’s time there in the 1960s, as well as detailed information about the AFI’s inaugural film school and Malick’s activities there; a deeply researched accounting of Malick’s wide and disparate influences both artistic and otherwise (I particularly found insightful the pinpointing of Jean Renoir as a stylistic influence on Malick as it pertains to his penchant for nature montage, including Renoir’s 1959 film Picnic in the Grass, a rare and still-unseen-by-me-because-of-that-reason picture that was the topic of discussion at a March 1970 Center for Advanced Film Studies seminar that Malick introduced); as well as other miscellaneous trivia / interesting ephemera about Malick that I had never heard before or had forgotten about, scattered throughout the book—but my main disappointment with the book can be hinted at by a simple mathematical accounting of the book’s content structure: full chapters on Badlands (47 pages), Days of Heaven (36 pages), The Thin Red Line (37 pages), The New World (37 pages), and The Tree of Life (39 pages), but then only one combined chapter on To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Voyage of Time (43 pages) and on Song to Song and A Hidden Life (47 pages). Woessner’s enthusiasm progressively starts to wane slightly as we hit To the Wonder and Knight of Cups and then reaches an obvious low point with Song to Song, where he goes from mostly hiding behind quotes from dissatisfied and confused critics to speaking outright on his opinion of it being lesser Malick. He still continues to provide interesting reference points and discussion of Malick’s evolution as a film-philosopher, so they aren’t totally worthless, but I’d be lying if I didn’t start to get a little worked-up during the Song to Song section in particular. He comes back to life a bit in the A Hidden Life section, a predictable move, but you can still sense that he’s uncomfortable to a certain degree with Malick’s progressive turn away from what one would probably call philosophy towards what one would probably call theology. His decision to do away with the common grouping of the three contemporary-set films does, however, strike me as usefully thought-provoking; he instead groups The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and Knight of Cups as part of what he calls the “confessional” trilogy—films explicitly based on parts of Malick’s biography—and recategorizes Song to Song next to A Hidden Life, two films that are more explicitly Christian in their outlook. As noted before, Woessner can’t quite hide his skepticism of the theological forwardness of these works, at least to the degree that in his mind it overshadows the philosophical or, in the case of A Hidden Life, the political; as a philosopher and academic, Woessner obviously seems more comfortable with questions than answers, and is noticeably more interested in the searching, wondering films of Malick’s pre-2012 career than his more “didactic,” per him, recent works. But another thing his regrouping of the 2010s films might hint at is an emphasis on Malick the thinker-philosopher rather than Malick the poet-stylist. There is a heavy imbalance throughout the book—I’d generously estimate it at 90/10—between discussion of ideas and discussion of style. I recognize that this is his prerogative as a writer coming from the academic field of philosophy, but I mention it because this seems to be the case for almost every book that gets written on Malick these days (caveat: I might be wrong, I haven’t read basically any of them, and it’s partly for this reason), and because, to me, any true accounting of Malick as an artist needs to grapple at-length with what he’s doing on the very specific level of cinema as an art. Even though Woessner tries to go beyond the academicism of other writings on Malick—the book jacket claims that it “suggests it is time for philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts, but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer”—as an academic his writing still inherently has an academicism to it that, while certainly readable, can’t quite jump into the thick of life the way many of the texts and films he references are able to. Nevertheless, to repeat the praise from the beginning, there’s enough here to interest the average Malick fanatic to warrant a look; apparently “newly available archival sources” were used by the author, and the information and insight those sources provide is probably the #1 reason why I’d tell someone to pick up the book if they were interested. Finally, part of the reason I find myself with many of the criticisms mentioned here, and that I’ve felt like taking the time to write them out, is that I’ve been increasingly envisioning myself as a writer of books, and it’s something I hope to make a vocation out of if the world will allow it. I’m in the trenches of attempting it right now, and I hope I will have good news to share on that front in the near future. But to return to Malick—after years of mostly refraining from trying to write about his films, I think I’ve finally reached a point where I’m looking forward to the day that I’ll be able to write my own book about them. (Such a book would probably be too concerned with theology to interest many cinephiles and too concerned with cinema to interest many theologians, so who knows how in the world I’d get it published, but that’s a future battle I’ll fight when I get there.) In the meantime, however, reading this new Malick book has inspired me to once again go back and take a chronological look at the films, and to take a very casual, preliminary stab at writing about them. The results of that can be found on my Letterboxd, where as of this writing I’ve scribbled notes about Badlands and Days of Heaven so far.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Shameless Engagement Boosting Blogpost About the Oscars


2023 was the first year of cinema where I happened to watch every nominee for Best Picture since my early days of movie fandom, circa a decade ago, the time in which the Oscars served their brief but instrumental role for me as a bridge from casual moviegoing to hardcore cinephilia. If memory serves, I watched the award ceremony in full for 2014’s movies, and maybe peeked at it for a few minutes for 2015’s, after which I stopped watching or caring—and thus ends my history with the prestigious Academy Awards. 

But, like I said, I watched the ten nominated films this year, and as a trickle of writing motivation has reemerged in me after a year-plus drought I thought it would be funny and/or interesting to make use of it by writing about the films that will be attending Oscar’s big night, as nothing sets the film world on fire like a new batch of highly publicized films to have a “take” on, and it tickles me (if no one else) to dedicate a post to such a subject on this esoteric little blog of mine. Why not attempt to draw more readership (as of this writing, my last post has received a whopping 47 views!) by shamelessly tapping into the zeitgeist? *Cracks knuckles*.

I don’t feel much impulse towards making State of Cinema diagnoses here whatsoever, so I’ll just say that what’s interesting to me about these nominees is that, looking at the list, I notice that all ten of the films have at one point or another been used as punching bags by certain camps of viewers and critics, bête noires that various people online have been vocal about not only being worthy of indifference, dislike, or even hatred, but as summing up, as being shining examples of, some of contemporary cinema’s worst tendencies. Such attacks—especially when coming into contact with perturbed defenders of the target—have catalyzed some of the most mind-numbing, head-scratching, brain-dulling “discourses” of the year. What would online film culture be without them? (Don’t answer that.) But anyone who is even halfway familiar with my whole thing will know that I try my best to not fall into what I see as the fallacies of criticism that litter much of these discussions, and to approach all films with a heart/mind openness that seeks opportunities for edification rather than occasions for excoriation, to put it succinctly.

And I found those opportunities, to varying degrees, in all ten of these films. I watched over 100 films that premiered in 2023, and without double-checking I would say only a few of them were things I ultimately didn’t find much edification in, relatively speaking. Movies are incredibly rich and complex objects; one thing that I can guarantee is that when reading someone’s thoughts or opinion on a film, positive or negative, you will never, ever encounter anywhere near 100% of the richness or complexity that that film possesses. Even something as simple and seemingly discountable as a tree in the background of a random shot has a value that cannot be accounted for within the thumbs-up or thumbs-down nature of any given person’s post-viewing verdict, whether it’s a joke Letterboxd review or a 10,000-word Substack essay; now expand that principle to a whole film, and you start to appreciate the absurdity of the tossed-off take that is online film culture’s bread and butter. As I like to say: it is impossible to do good film criticism without first realizing the impossibility of doing film criticism. And maybe one day I will borrow Richard Linklater’s debut title and write something called “It’s Impossible To Learn To Watch Movies By Reading (What Passes For) Film Criticism.”

Which is maybe a long way of announcing that I will not actually be writing about the ten films nominated for Best Picture. Well, I will—sort of. To do the films justice as films would take too much time and effort, and anyway I want to use this opportunity as an excuse to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, which is not film criticism, but rather: film criticism criticism. That is, take as my starting point not the films, but criticism of the films, mainly addressing various flaws in film critical thinking via writing on these specific films, which should, if I do it the way I’m imagining it, end up producing writing on the actual films, if in an unorthodox, circuitous way. We’ll see.

I’ve decided that rather than hunt down particular pieces on each of the films, or expend untold effort trying to synthesize common criticisms I’ve seen of each film, I will simply use the writing of one film critic and one film critic only. The (un)lucky winner: Richard Brody. I select him for a number of reasons: first, because I know he’s written about all ten films in one place or another; second, because there is no other tenured film critic of his stature that I respect more. Brody was my first favorite film critic, and even though over the years I’ve outgrown the need for such a thing, I still enjoy reading his thoughts, and either enthusiastically agreeing with them (as is often the case) or testing my own critical philosophies against them. He writes with a sharpness and clarity of thought that makes both scenarios fun. And I know that on the off chance that Mr. Brody reads this, he’ll take it like the gentleman and scholar that he is; anyway, it’s hardly worth noting when I disagree with a critic, because the only person I agree with 100% on all matters philosophy of film viewing is myself, and at times not even him.

Before we get started, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that I’m very aware of a certain ridiculousness and irresponsibility that comes with dedicating a year-end piece of sorts like this to the ten films that by dint of their Oscar-nominated status have already received and will continue to receive the most attention out of all the hundreds, thousands of films that 2023 gave us. Surely my time, efforts, and blog’s however-little-read space could be better used to shine a light on the many great new films that first came my way in 2023 that are much more neglected, much more unjustly derided, or simply put much more deserving of having words written after them. For example, radical new international films like in water, Pacifiction, Trenque Lauquen, The Plains, or De humani corporis fabrica; new and surprising works from old masters like Master Gardener, Ferrari, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Padre Pio, The Boy and the Heron, Napoleon, or Silent Night; shorts from recently departed greats like Trailer for the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’ or Passing Time; audacious films from younger directors like Beau Is Afraid or Infinity Pool;  continued greatness from established filmmakers like Asteroid City, Priscilla, or Showing Up; unjustly derided films like Gran Turismo, The Boogeyman, or The Exorcist: Believer; smaller hand-crafted films like The Sweet East, Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater, or The Adults; non-English films that made it stateside like Afire, Fallen Leaves, Godland, The Taste of Things, Walk Up, Unrest, or Godzilla: Minus One; fascinating objects like Marlowe, The Lost King, A Haunting in Venice, BlackBerry, or Shadow Kingdom; French-language films crossing the Atlantic like Scarlet, Saint Omer, Tori and Lokita, One Fine Morning, Revoir Paris, or Other People’s Children; films hiding out on Netflix like The Killer, May December, Reptile, the first part of Rebel Moon, or Wes Anderson’s quartet of Roald Dahl films beginning with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar; to name just a few.

So hopefully I can make it up to you all in the near future with some more esoteric posts about more neglected things, but for now—the Oscar nominees for Best Picture (in preferential order):

(PS: Scroll past all the word blocks to skip to the fun part where I pick my own Oscar nominees/winners.)

....

10. American Fiction 


Of the ten films here, American Fiction was the one I was most on the edge about seeing—part of what ultimately makes a philosophy of viewing like mine possible (in other words, what gets me tagged as “that guy who likes every movie”) is that I rarely ever put myself in a situation of watching something that, based on appearances, seems unlikely to be of much interest. Film history would be overwhelmingly large even if we had twice the expected lifespan, so prioritization is a must. But in the end I couldn’t pass up a film with a title like American Fiction; the world of American literature, especially modern American literature, seemed too esoteric of a subject to produce something not worth watching. (Also, I admit, a small sense of completionism compelled me, as I was sitting at 9/10 nominees seen.) Although the topic interests me I can’t claim any expertise (I’m too busy reading War and Peace et al. to seemingly ever pick up something contemporary); still, the film’s conjuring of the modern publishing landscape reads as humorously accurate to me, where serious, challenging fiction is an afterthought to the all-consuming pull of mass-marketability, be it in the form of cheap thrills/romance/etc. or, as here, socially conscious fiction intended to flatter the average middlebrow liberal. This is something I have cause to casually think about pretty often, and though if presented with a representative of each option I will nine times out of ten choose to read the socially useless doorstop that aspires to high art, I’m glad that American Fiction ultimately finds an interesting dialectical line to walk within this conversation. Still, the film’s real aspirations are of the meta-fictional kind, and the way the story eventually infiltrates the film industry finally leads to a moment just before the end of the film that was to me far and away the most interesting, complex and edifying thing about it, a shot-reverse shot between Jeffrey Wright’s novelist and a black extra chilling on a film set in slave garb with airpods in, which conjures a hundreds-years-long story of oppression, representation, and exploitation that raises more questions than answers, which is a cliché phrase that I use to simply stand in for the inarticulatable complexity that cinema is capable of trafficking in.

Brody calls the film a watered-down version of the novel it’s based on—Pericval Everett’s Erasure (2001), which sounds fascinating—and I can’t argue with the examples he gives to prove it. He also calls it “style-challenged,” and although I agree the film’s form isn’t anything to write poetry after, I do recall a couple memorable scene transition cuts, including one that transitions from a character death to a close-up shot of a bird flying across the sky, which is the sort of thing that really does the trick for me. Brody writes that “it was impossible not to feel that something was missing—some sense of style and abandon,” relative to the book, even before he had read it. A film need not have any loyalty to its source material, content- or form-wise, and a film by definition cannot be “missing” anything—it is what it is—but I mostly just take this to mean exactly what Brody says in the introduction to the piece where he writes on the film, which is basically that some works of art are less interesting than other works of art, which, relative to the best films of 2023, happens to be the case here. Which is much less sexy and provocative than calling this a “bad movie,” a phrase which pretty much implies the same thing, but also a phrase the connotations of which set people off in the direction of anti-nuance, anti-complexity, and anti-[a lot of important things when thinking/talking about art], besides showing me that the user of it probably harbors his or her fair share of critical fallacies. So you won’t ever see me using it.


9. Poor Things 


I had originally planned to wait to watch this until it came out on DVD, but I ended up seeing it in theatres due to an unfortunate circumstance involving a power outage that left me unable to see my original selection (The Zone of Interest) and unwilling to return home with nothing to show for my travels. It’s a compliment to the film that I didn’t regret my decision to stay. This is one of those films that is entertaining and interesting and original enough on a minute-to-minute basis to make me not really be all that worked up about what I found unedifying about its contents, so I’ll mostly leave that be—suffice it to say that what many have pointed out, Brody included, about its radical feminism perhaps being neither as radical or feminist as it would like it to be, is in the ballpark of where my unedification would lie. Even so, the film still manages to stage a general narrative arc of personal enlightenment for Emma Stone’s character that ended for me on a surprisingly moving note, and a funny one, too—as far as such clever movie-world shenanigans go. But what I really want to talk about is style. So much of the criticism of the movie I’ve seen from cinephile folks seems to come in the form of nausea at the film’s retro-futurist aesthetic and fisheye-friendly form. Brody terms this Lanthimos’ “overbearingly ornate décor.” His style is “without substance; it’s simply ornamental, imposingly garish, insignificant,” and “over-reliant on fish-eye lenses... as if he were conducting real-estate tours of his scenery.” Having your décor be too ornate, having your style be too garish, and using a fish-eye camera lens too much are all crimes that I cannot find listed in the encyclopedia of legitimate movie criticism—they’re made up, and had Brody found substance in the film’s content I think it’s probable that the above list of criticisms would disappear. It’s the classic all style no substance argument, which has been trotted out again and again by critics for over a hundred years now. I see what is meant here—as hinted at above, I agree that “substance”-wise Poor Things is not in the top tier of this year’s films—but to me no style is without substance, as the style in and of itself makes up its own substance. The “substance” of a stylized shot of a Victorian bridge against a deep blue sky is that Victorian bridge against that deep blue sky. Additionally what it cuts from and what it cuts to. Plus whatever sound or silence is on the audio track. Et cetera. It all goes together to make what we call cinema. I don’t think calling any style ornamental and insignificant really says much, given that without it there would be no movie at all. (Forgive me if I’m taking the words too literally.) Still, to my eyes Poor Things appears passionate and excited to be a work of moving image art/entertainment, and its grab bag style seems to match the immature yet creative nature of its protagonist—at the very least, it’s something new, and odd, which is invigorating and of interest in itself, at least to me. Accusations of “baby’s first weird movie” are ironic, because that’s kind of what the movie is about—while watching I admit to thinking of words from Stan Brakhage’s famous opening to his Metaphors on Vision (1960): “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’ How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?” The film is wondrously awash in color of every kind, and at times seems to take on the toddler’s glee of the world that teems around them. Perhaps this perspective—understandably so, in aspects—was ultimately a bit too infantile for many adult cinephiles to fall for.


8. Maestro 


It pains me for the sophomore feature from the director of A Star Is Born (2018) to be so low on this list—not because it’s not an interesting movie, but because I think I failed to really appreciate the idiosyncrasies of it on first viewing, which is the only viewing I’ve had. (So take what I say here with a grain of first impressions’ salt.) Even after an introductory paragraph calling it out as a “bad critical habit,” Brody mostly plays the game of basing his review of Maestro around what was left out, good and bad and complex, from Leonard Bernstein’s real life. “The danger of yielding to that feeling is that one spends more time and effort thinking about what a movie isn’t than confronting what it is. Yet this emptiness, in its way, often proves—as it does in Maestro—so pervasive that a movie seemingly undermines itself.” In a way, I don’t disagree—on first glance Maestro does come across as rather vacant, at least where conventional cinematic drama and emotion is concerned. But I think to stop there is to stop short of just where this movie becomes interesting, and to give in to cliché movie viewing and reviewing tendencies. In order to make any headway with this movie, I think we have to double down on exactly what Brody bypasses: to spend time and effort confronting what the movie is, not what it isn’t. I can’t say I learned very much about Leonard Bernstein from the motion picture Maestro directed by Bradley Cooper. But this isn’t necessarily the purpose of movies; if I wanted to do that, I’d pick up a biography and read it—and with pleasure. I can’t even say I felt very much of Leonard Bernstein’s inner life from the motion picture Maestro directed by Bradley Cooper. Which also—as hard as it is to say—isn’t necessarily the purpose of movies. But isn’t it?? It very often is—for example, just think back to last year’s TÁR, itself a strange movie but still containing a moving scene of a video of Bernstein being watched by his fictional protégé, which aroused in me a more conventionally emotional feeling than anything I felt in Maestro—and yet where does it say it has to be? Once we get past this admittedly difficult hurdle, and rewire our brains towards really, honestly taking the movie for what it is, a new field opens in front of us with many avenues towards appreciation. For example, the idea that this movie is much more about Bradley Cooper than it is about Leonard Bernstein. Or that the nearly grotesque imitation-acting that’s going on by Cooper and Carey Mulligan isn’t just Oscar mugging, but some kind of physical-spiritual possession that is attempting to conjure a three-dimensional ghost-image of history. Or that this hyper-material scheme combined with the fantastical, elliptical scene- and narrative-structure is out to reach some kind of bizarre, quotidian yet transcendental meaning out of man-in-history cinematic storytelling. Something is going on here, and I think it is highly unusual, thus why many people were left stumped, indifferent, or disgusted. (Or you loved it, in a normal way, and my first viewing was just a misviewing and most of what I’m saying makes me sound loony.) When late in the film Bernstein pulls up to a concert venue in his car and the radio is playing the exact part of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” that references Bernstein, this can’t be a corny meta-joke, it must be a sign that Bradley Cooper is operating on a galaxy brain level of actor-director-shamanist that most are not privy to. Or so it seems to me.

Look, I have to see the film again. Years from now this might look like complete gibberish to me. But this is, in the here and now, my brief attempt to go beyond the kind of critical outlook that shuts down when not provided with what a “great film” is supposed to give you. Brody ends his review calling it “a failure of imaginative sympathy, or, simply, of imagination.” Brody shows his own imagination in all the details that he subjectively calls to mind about Bernstein that would have, in his mind, made a more complex and edifying film about Bernstein—and these details are edifying to read in and of themselves. But I believe it is the job of the critic and viewer, when faced with a film that does not conventionally satisfy, to first test if the failure of imagination is one’s own, rather than the filmmaker’s. The flexing of imagination it takes to perform this test is worth doing for its own sake, anyway. And you may just happen upon something that makes the film click.

 

7. Anatomy of a Fall


Something I find charming about Brody is that when he really wants to go for the jugular in judging a film’s form, he goes straight for the TV comparison. “It’s prestige cinema,” he writes about Anatomy of a Fall. Later: “The direction of the courtroom scenes has the blandly declarative generality of a TV movie cramming its script details in ahead of the next commercial.” It’s been many years since I watched a contemporary prestige TV series that wasn’t made by someone I followed there from movies, so I try my best to keep silent about the medium. Yet I think I understand what Brody is getting at when he makes the comparison, which is simply that the form does the bare minimum; that is, it’s simply there so the script can be filmed. Brody calls the form “numbingly conventional”—but viewed from a more forgiving lens, couldn’t we just call it classical? It shows what it needs to show, simply and efficiently. Admittedly, of all the nominees Anatomy of a Fall is probably the one I that remember the least, which could be chalked up to having seen some of the others more recently and also, maybe, to the merely illustrative nature of the form, what I might more cynically term somewhat forgettable; although the images I do recall I don’t think deserve to be called that.

In his review Brody does a lot of script nitpicking. He lists examples of how the film merely reinforces “prefabricated attitudes,” “artistic failings [that] are obvious and distracting throughout.” Most of them have to do with how the film ostensibly sets the viewer up to exonerate Sandra Hüller’s character from the get-go. To put it bluntly, this seems more a problem with viewers that have script-brain than a problem with the film itself. None of these examples, in the nitty gritty of the film, are or should be seen as script elements, but rather 3D characters or characteristics that complicate the film as a whole, as a world, rather than just its did-she-or-didn’t-she narrative. (Well, maybe one—the prosecuting attorney, which seems more an issue of the profession rather than the film’s depiction of it; for whatever reason, prosecutors in movies are the epitome of unlikable to me, and I have an easier time empathizing with much more ostensibly despicable characters than with them.) Brody’s criticisms imply something that I think a lot of viewers, for or against the movie, take to be the case: that the movie is in fact a did-she-or-didn’t-she drama. To me—and this may just be a symptom of the way my brain works, which I like about it—the film seems decidedly unconcerned about “what actually happened.” Even Hüller’s character herself seems unconcerned, and defends herself neither out of a sadistic desire to get away with it (if she did it) nor out of a deep-rooted need to be seen as innocent (if she didn’t). Everytime I see a Twitter poll about the true anatomy of the titular fall, I see the Point being missed. I think the movie has a lot more up its sleeve than being a courtroom drama, and that the old Hollywood point of reference isn’t Preminger but Hitchcock, where the entire accident and resulting trial is one huge MacGuffin used merely to hang the real—and much less sensational—drama on. And anyway, nobody “did it”—it’s a movie, and I think the movie knows it’s a movie, in the best way, where the fake is used to get at the real, fooling the audience into contact with the latter via the spectacle of the former. So while I agree with Brody that the film wasn’t exactly deserving of the Palme d’or—the winner rarely is—given some of the other films in competition, I also don’t feel like taking away any laurels from a film that ends with a shot and an idea as great as the one that ends this film—another one of those moments that cinema is so good at, where a runtime’s worth of accumulation suddenly settles into something inarticulatably deep and complex, and then the credits roll.

 

6. Past Lives


When Brody finally published words on Past Lives there was one particularly line that I kept seeing passed around victoriously on Twitter by all those who had been oh-so-rebelliously proclaiming the film “mid” for weeks and months before: “But Past Lives is a movie of A students, by A students, for A students so accustomed to analyzing works for their structure and their unities that they connect around a movie that, apart from the actors’ own presences, offers nothing else.” Brody again finds himself imagining a different, better version of the movie he’s seen and using it to beat up on the actual film as it is; he bristles at the too-clean structure and the underwritten characters, at a strong story idea that doesn’t succeed in transferring the passions of those behind the movie into the movie itself—“it’s a movie waiting to be realized.” The film Brody imagines in his head may very well be, were it to exist for comparison, a more edifying movie. But it doesn’t exist, and once again looking at the film for what it actually is can lead us down some interesting paths of appreciation. The film’s carefully calibrated three-act structure, of equally spaced time jumps from youth to young adulthood to adulthood, of clear thematic and conceptual throughlines, need not be ungraciously attacked as some kind of overly perfect cinematic schema that is more script than cinema. Why can’t a film be structured so? Movies are not real life, so movies do not inherently need to capture some kind of messiness that so often invades or even defines our lives over any given number of years. The clear lines of Past Lives strike me less as film school screenwriting tics than as signs of a certain structural tenderness that works towards an overall gentility and maturity re: the nature of time. And anyways—who cares about the script?? Anyone who speaks of a “good script” or a “bad script” shouldn’t be let within fifty miles of film criticism. Start your own genre of script criticism if you must, but don’t bring that garbage over here. A film is a film, not a stack of paper with words on it. Brody even gestures at this idea when mentioning that the only thing the film offers is “the actors’ own presences”; but the concept of an underwritten character is a fantasy, because what makes a character is what the camera sees and what the microphone hears as it is trained upon the actor—presence, a three-dimensional being, in all its material and emotional particularity, to the degree that the filmmakers are able to capture it via their particular style. Last year I tweeted out a vague thought related to Past Lives’ form by comparing it to one of my favorite films of last decade, Kogonoda’s Columbus (2017), another film people took umbrage with for being too... formalized, I guess is how I’ll put it. This isn’t a criticism to me; it’s a description. I said that “I have a soft spot for stuff like Past Lives or Columbus, aestheticized stillness, ‘obvious’ themes/emotions, similar to Netflix romance originals where beautiful people w/script-induced problems are perfectly articulate and/or movie-inarticulate.... It’s just another version of the heightened/distorted/etc. reality that cinema can be.” I stand by this, because so many criticisms of so many movies can be easily and freeingly dismissed by a simple declaration that, “OK, cinema can be this, too.” And maybe Past Lives’ story concept was just too much catnip for me, but in the end I was moved by the film’s patience, its visual tenderness, its mature handling of fantasy/reality, and its contemplative, sit-and-stare approach to the complexity that flows from life multiplied by time.

 

5. Barbie


...and now for some real fun! The most enduring pleasure—or for many, pain—across the year on film twitter was Brody popping up regularly to effusively praise Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as the best thing since sliced bread, haters and naysayers (of both himself and the movie) be damned. While I can’t go quite as far as Brody here—the film landed at a high third place on his year-end list—I have nothing but admiration for the way he bobbed and weaved with an Ali-esque grace through a whole host of film critical fallacies that the movie inspired in many other critics. Where many “serious” cinephiles found an apparently self-explanatory and annoyingly pompous rallying cry in Amy Taubin’s succinct hand-wave dismissal of the film (“It’s about a fucking doll”), Brody stood behind the more mature and imaginative belief that meaningful, serious, personal art could be made out of any subject—yes, even a doll.  Others pointed to the fact that the film was produced by the doll’s own manufacturer as some kind of obvious evidence that it de facto could not be a serious film, and in fact was nothing more than a “toy commercial,” whereas Brody saw an artist confronting her own circumstances of art-making with subversive leaps of imagination in a film that unashamedly addresses the real via the fake: “She doesn’t borrow pop culture ironically; she embraces it passionately and directly, in order to transform it, and thereby to transform viewer’s relationships to it and render that relationship active, critical, non-nostalgic.” Part of Brody’s defense of the film was also an impassioned defense of anti-realism, of the kind of stylish fantasy that—because of its infinity of possibilities compared to realism’s—is the stronger test of a filmmaker’s imaginative capacities. And I pretty much agree that Gerwig passed the test with flying colors, albeit relatively speaking; compared to something like, say, this year’s Beau Is Afraid, the images/editing don’t inspire the same enraptured, mouth-agape awe in me. Even Gerwig’s last effort, Little Women (2019), sings to me on a level of montage that far outpaces not just Barbie, but almost all Hollywood films of the last five years—yet, along with Lady Bird (2017), Brody for some reason finds it a much lesser work. The substance of my own appreciation of Barbie is, however, a few steps removed from Brody’s. Although many commentators attempted to recruit the film into the culture wars as some kind of ultra-feminist, radically anti-patriarchal text, tears were brought to my (male) eyes more for the film’s complexly simple evocation of Being. Of defining yourself not by being a man or a woman but by being a person who lives in the world with other people. Of existing not to be reliant on but responsible to those other people. (For me, the documentary analog to Barbie that I would encourage everyone to seek out is the incredible Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry [2021], a film that opens itself up to the complexities of Living as a Human more than anything else in recent memory.) On the surface “I am Ken-ough” may have looked like a cute slogan offered to wrap up a side character’s arc, but in the trenches of the film it hit like the kind of motto that if taken to heart could be a legitimate salve to gender relations. Maybe I’m a pushover (and if so, glad to be one), but the film’s “cliché” closing montage through its punchline ending felt like a moving paean to being human that called on the history of non-human yearning in cinema from Disney’s Pinocchio to Spielberg’s A.I. There were a couple dozen films I saw in 2023 that were more interesting than Barbie (just to keep everything in perspective here), but few other films produced more consistently short-sighted takes from the serious cinephile set, which to someone who aims to rid cinephilia of such things was, although not unexpected, somewhat disappointing. “But the film made a billion dollars, it doesn’t need defenders!” The almighty dollar does not speak for me.

 

4. The Zone of Interest


From one of Brody’s most loved to one of his most hated; another film which repeatedly set online discourse aflame, and another one which made my brain ache for all the critical fallacies which it inspired—more understandable fallacies, I will grant, given the film’s serious and sensitive subject matter, and yet fallacies all the same. Many of the negative reactions to the film, Brody’s included, spout a similar refrain: that Glazer’s film doesn’t “pull it off.” What they’re referring to of course is the film’s formal and conceptual conceit, which you’re probably well aware of even if you haven’t actually seen the film. Herein lies the problem: the vast majority of critiques aimed at the film seem to address themselves to the film’s concept, what the film is on paper, rather than to the film itself. This goes back to something I mentioned in the introduction to this piece, which is essentially that movies are way more complex than we subsequently pretend they are when we talk about them—there is way more going on. For example, when critics talk about The Zone of Interest, they mention the mise-en-scheme of immobile, surveillance-esque montage and the film’s geographic relationship to the walls of the concentration camp, but I’ve yet to see anyone pay detailed attention to the actual aesthetic substance of the film’s images beyond their role in the conceptual program. Let’s merely begin with the film’s opening shot, of the family lounging in swimwear on a grassy hill above a lake, the camera seemingly hiding behind them in some tall grass. Can we speak of the beauty of this shot? Of its simple, ontological pleasure, of its sharp sound-image capturing of man in nature, of its camera-stolen staged reality? (And then of course the complicated co-existence of this beauty with the brutal ugliness of the surrounding goings-on, as underscored later in a river-bathing scene.) And as the montage unfolds, can we speak of the pure visual and aesthetic interest of this bold editing blueprint? Of the totally fascinating cinematic pleasure of things like, say, the avant-garde collage of flowers at one point (recalling another of the year’s boldest films, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener)? The movie cannot be approached just on the level of idea—it must be grappled with on the level of material, cinematic reality. Brody, like others (even those who responded positively), watches the movie and then produces his read on what it does (and his problems with said doings) as though it were a simple matter of film critical math, Glazer’s apparent intentions neatly added into the equation. (A quick Googling of “the intentional fallacy” would do good for many here, by the way.) “Showing off hands kept knowingly clean is no less vain or vulgar than getting them naïvely dirty,” writes Brody of the “faux-abstinence” of the film in a tweet inspired by flipping the idea behind Serge Daney’s famous “Tracking Shot in Kapo” essay. We’re again at a point where I think it would be more edifying for people if they simply let the film be what it is without accusing it of posturing. I haven’t read a lot from the film’s makers, but it may very well be that Glazer’s stated intentions were misguided from the get go or were unsuccessfully realized. However, the film is its own beast, and lives and breathes on its own, apart from its makers, on the screen, for those who view it. Like for me, who came away from it with the impression that the film basically amounted to a simple family drama—dad is forced to take a new position in his company and has to work away from home for a while—made fascinating and involving and complicated by its incredibly specific historical context. Part of the problem for many viewers, I am guessing, stems from an understandable inability to grant human three-dimensionality (and therefore any shred of empathy) to historical characters that represent, culturally, the personification of evil. But if total moral complexity is allowed to stay, one grants oneself a more dense film, and the resulting feeling of confusion and sadness in the face of quotidian moral failings is more robustly human. The film’s audacious jump to the modern day utterly moved me, in a juxtaposition that does as much to complicate our relationship to history as the more well-received coda of Killers of the Flower Moon. So in the end, I walked away having experienced a serious work of art rather than merely some kind of intellectual art installation. The mélange of carefully calibrated artfulness and unsentimental moral reckoning made the film a thrilling alien object that shook me to a rare and unique degree.

 

3. The Holdovers


Much of the criticism directed at The Holdovers involves Alexander Payne’s decision to not only set the film at the beginning of the 1970s but to also give it the veneer of the kind of movie made back then. The “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” appraisals wrote themselves, and in turn so did criticisms of the film’s perceived nostalgia. “Not only does this hermetically sealed, historically reduced drama falsify the times in which the movie is set, it falsifies the characters and turns them into automata of the plot’s mechanism,” writes Brody. The real core of the movie’s nostalgia is “a cinematic nostalgia for an earlier generation’s coddled mainstream, one fabricated by Hollywood’s calculated suppression of whatever might risk controversy too wide or serious to be monetized.” As is a recurring theme here, Brody spends a whole paragraph listing things he thought should have been in the movie, such as the various political ferments circa 1970 that “it was impossible to be alive, even as a teenager, and not be aware of....” I won’t rehash my argument against such critical maneuvers, so I’ll just say that if Brody wants to direct a movie so bad, he should(—again; to anyone with a file of 1995’s Liability Crisis, my DMs are wiiiiide open.) Part of the problem is taking Payne’s gesture of setting his film when he does and making it look like what he does in bad faith. Brody posits that the film “returns to a way of telling a story that reflects what, to Payne, comes off as a simpler, clearer, perhaps more humane time.” Regardless of what I think Payne’s reasoning behind his decision was, the film bears out a human complexity on the level of story and character and environment that makes such a statement appear unfair. Payne has more than acquitted himself in telling a modern day story—The Descendants (2011) and Nebraska (2013) are both contemporary classics—and even a futuristic one with Downsizing (2017), and all of these films contain the same attention to detail in story and character and environment as The Holdovers. But I do think a 1970-set drama blanketed by a sheen of faux-film grain does allow for a certain purifying of all these things, a removal of distractions of sorts, so as to really, truly get down to the business of telling a complex story on a movie screen, where that story and its complexity is all that matters. Brody is spot-on when he says that “the movie is a pile of clichés reprocessed with such loving immediacy that it feels as if Payne were discovering them for himself.” À la another director who debuted in the ‘90s, James Gray, Payne shows an uncommon and old-fashioned dedication to the art of storytelling that is decidedly unsexy. First time feature film writer David Hemingson provides a script that is classically shapen and which doles out character information parallel to the film’s progression, in Good Script fashion. We saw Brody call the characters “automata of the plot’s mechanism,” and in the sense that is absolutely true—but I can’t use it as a pejorative, because this is simply how much great cinema, especially classic Hollywood cinema, works: characters follow a predetermined path from the beginning of a movie to the end of a movie. (There are other types of movies, and those are great too, but it doesn’t make these not great as well.) Of all the Best Picture nominees, The Holdovers is in a sense the least original; but in another sense it’s one of the most radical. To make another Gray comparison, Payne’s art here is not in wowing us with the new, but reacquainting us with the old, at a deeper level—he actively doubles down on what came before, and as a result, inherently produces something new. Contributing to the newness is the simple fact that it is 2023, not 1970, and the film is not actually shot on film, but merely a digital facsimile of it. The act is not quite as radical and rewarding as that of, say, Mank (2020)—which merely claimed to copy 1930s movies on its way to looking like nothing else has ever looked—but it still creates a dissonance with modern moviegoing that forces the contemporary viewer into a new mode of seeing and hearing, and thus perhaps a new way of being-with-a-film, one that’s more still and slow and pushes you into engagement with the film (and by extension, life) at a more thoroughly enveloping level. Ultimately The Holdovers was 2023’s humblest film this side of Hong Sang-soo, and thus for me a radical gesture, not only cinematically but existentially. It rewards a sensitivity to movie- and life-things in the way the best films always do.

 

2. Killers of the Flower Moon


Scorsese’s latest groundshaking opus was Brody’s #1 movie of the year when it came time for list-making, so I’ve been afforded a rare opportunity to tag team with him re: this film’s thunderous greatness before we end this little exercise at a final site of disagreement. The enormous amount of movie Killers of the Flower Moon contains within its brisk three-and-a-half hours is appropriate for the enormity of the subject that Scorsese tackles, which is basically nothing less than injustice itself, and history’s forgetting and/or exploitation of it. The film’s story sprawls across its American landscape and into every pocket of Osage County’s population, roaming from its newly wealthy Native people to the white settlers who’ve arrived to strip it from them and everything in between. The teeming sense of a community on the brink of and in the midst of uninvestigated tragedy is as rich and detailed and unique a creation as American cinema has ever seen thanks to Apple’s generous $200 million loan to one of the premiere artists in the world of film art going back fifty years. The film is astoundingly watchable while still striking a fascinatingly unique chord in the history of megabudget mise-en-scène—this could very well be the formal and moral endpoint of Scorsese’s run of gangster/gangster-adjacent films going back to Goodfellas (1990) and through Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and The Irishman (2019), the last of which heralded this end-of-career downshift away from the vivacious thrills & kills mentality of those earlier films and towards a more haunted register of trans-historical sadness. The kills in Killers are absolutely numb, totally gleeless, unglamorized, and dully hyper-material, scored by silence—the sound of a gunshot and a body slumped to the dirt. There isn’t even a hint of vicarious thrill; indeed, they actively hurt to witness, and the way Scorsese and longtime editor / fellow octogenarian Thelma Schoonmaker cut to them unlinearly in the midst of the unfolding quotidian horrors is a brutal and bitter artistic choice. Killers of the Flower Moon is not a traditional movie in any sense beyond its basic Griffith-descended film grammar (in fact the mass of characters and extras dodging in and out of Rodrigo Prieto’s camera frame feels like something out of The Pigs of Musketeer Alley, given the period setting); the performances by dual Scorsese legends DiCaprio and DeNiro are ungainly, actorly creations of complex near-mugging that play on both stars’ talent for bumbling charm, which feed into a movie-wide contrast between the whites and natives, whose performances are furiously and calmly naturalistic, as led by Lily Gladstone. What this contributes to is a deeply complex rendering of human nature uneasily summarized or explained, which is appropriate for an historical tale that defies our common sense understanding of what people are capable of—hence the difficulty for some in being “convinced” by the central portrait of a marriage, as little of it is spelled out beyond the bodies and faces and voices of DiCaprio and Gladstone. “The movie doesn’t explain what Mollie is thinking while her sisters are dying young,” writes Brody, “or while she’s getting sicker during Ernest’s treatments. It doesn’t explain what Ernest thinks when he’s first put up to nonviolent crime and then is dispatched on lethal errands. The character psychology of Killers of the Flower Moon is minimal—because Scorsese instead presses its action furiously, urgently, onto the screen as if it were something like dramatized documentary in the first person, his own bearing of witness.” Part of what I find fascinating about the film’s form is its similarity to the kind of docudrama series one might find on, say, the History Channel, all while still being supremely cinematic—soaring drone shots over masses of cattle and oil fields, landscape shots of flowers and dancing natives, etc. While retaining the complexity of a movie, Scorsese explicitly makes a moral history lesson, something that educates as much as (if not more than) it entertains. Hence why Scorsese’s final cameo is so meaningful and moving, for all the obvious reasons and more; it transcends the film and direct-addresses the audience in a way that both does and does not break the fourth wall, speaking to history and to the present, to both the audience and himself, with a dead-serious compassion that is all the more heartbreaking because, for the people it commemorates, it comes a century too late. Such is living through history, and with this film Scorsese has written it with not just lightning but thunder as well. I left the theater shocked and shaken, and knowing that no words would do it justice, just as these haven’t.

 

1. Oppenheimer


I don’t even know where to start with this one, as Brody is so wrong on so many counts, and this film is so magnificent in so many ways. You know what? Maybe I’ll just leave him out of this one, because at a certain point there’s no use either reading or reacting to criticism that flat out does not respect the film in front of them as the film in front of them. We’ve already seen this before, and it’s maybe Brody’s favorite fallacy to try and get away with. But that won’t fly here. Here is a quote that wins the prize of most outlandish thing I’ve read from him as part of this little project: “For long stretches of the film, Nolan’s direction is a merely literal depiction of actors dispensing dialogue with efficiency but without flair; if his name weren’t attached, the direction might well be ascribed to a serial-television journeyman.” (Emphasis mine.) What? What?! Oppenheimer only represents maybe the most serious attempt at Soviet montage at a big budget level in the history of modern American cinema, but sure, what you said. “The movie is as sluggish as if Nolan were underlining the script’s most salient passages onscreen, and, with a more vigorous pace, it could have amplified the script without adding a minute of screentime.” Yeah, sure—a three-hour long historical biopic 50% of which is in black & white made close to a billion US dollars despite being “sluggish” and not having a “vigorous pace.” What film was being watched? Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame only went into another artistic stratosphere to conjure up a project with such immaculate rhythm and pacing that it is nothing less than pure visual music from IMAX frame #1 on. The opening fifteen minutes or so is already maybe the most iconic editing sequence in recent cultural memory, and rightly so: Nolan intersperses young Oppenheimer’s school years with subatomic visions, and his artistic and scientific intake with scenes of a troubled mind straining towards the bleeding edge of intellectual modernity. Despite its incredibly dense wordiness at times, Oppenheimer takes an image-first (and cut-second) approach to cinematic storytelling. Cillian Murphy’s face becomes it’s own vast and infinite terrain as close-ups turn into abstract portraits (like the Picasso he views in the abovementioned sequence) and reaction shots become glimpses into not just emotion but soul and conscience. Nolan stages a drama both immense and intimate via the counterintuitive use of bulky 65 mm IMAX film on a by-all-accounts high-focus high-paced shoot. The energy and vitality of every single filmed moment is astonishing. The film is, in one word, a symphony. Nolan’s ambitions have only been growing and his art has kept up with him every step of the way. Everything is bolder; more intuitive. Each cut speeds into the next with a confidence and a purpose that would make Eisenstein and Griffith lock eyes from across a hypothetical screening room. The film’s play with time and competing perspectives ricochets into a complex web of drama that accumulates morsel after morsel of emotional and intellectual information in order to reconstruct the man Robert J. Oppenehimer via cinematic mosaic, all while still letting him remain enigmatic, an Other that we will never be able to fully access, a man of contradiction and paradox and nuance. The world doesn’t like complicated people. And vice versa: people don’t like a complicated world. And yet Nolan graphs as much world-historical complexity as he can muster onto this story of the bomb and the man who made it, from the tiniest invisible details all the way to a God’s eye view of a planet racing towards self-destruction. At the end of the day cinema has nothing to do with critics or criticism; it’s about sitting down in front of a film like this and giving yourself over to it, mind body and spirit, and letting every last inch of whatever aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual edification it contains make full-force impact with every last inch of who you are as an irreducibly complex human being. That fusion is what it’s all about, and the fusion between me and Oppenheimer back in the summer of 2023 happened to be hands down one of the most electrifying experiences of my movie-going year. And sure, I look forward with mild amusement to receiving a stream of second- and third-hand news Monday morning about all the gold this took home.

 

.....

 

Now that you’ve made it this far (or skipped down—no offense taken), here are my own hypothetical Oscar picks, in as many categories as I could reasonably fill, from all the films that first became available to me to legally see from January 1 through December 31, 2023 (sorry for the extra spacing, I can't for the life of me figure out how to fix it):

 

Best Picture:


Beau Is Afraid

in water

The Killer

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Lost King

Master Gardener

May December

Oppenheimer

Pacifiction

 

Best Director:

 

Wes Anderson – Asteroid City

Hong Sang-soo – in water

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer

Paul Schrader – Master Gardener

Martin Scorsese – Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Best Actor:

 

Michael Cera – The Adults

Leonardo DiCaprio – Killers of the Flower Moon

Michael Fassbender – The Killer

Thomas Schubert – Afire

Keifer Sutherland – The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

 

Best Supporting Actor:

 

Jason Clarke – The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer

Jacob Elordi – Priscilla

Glenn Howerton – BlackBerry

Charles Melton – May December

 

Best Actress:

 

Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon

Natalie Portman – May December

Talia Ryder – The Sweet East

Cailee Spaeny – Priscilla

Sophie Thatcher – The Boogeyman

 

Best Supporting Actress:

 

Haily Atwell – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Maeve Courtier-Lilley – Gran Turismo

Mia Goth – Infinity Pool

Hannah Gross – The Adults

Quintessa Swindell – Master Gardener

 

Best Original Screenplay:

 

Wes Anderson – Asteroid City

Laura Citarella & Laura Paredes – Trenque Lauquen

Christian Petzold – Afire

Nick Pinkerton – The Sweet East

Paul Schrader – Master Gardener

 

Best Adapted Screenplay:

 

Wes Anderson – The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Steve Coogan & Jeff Pope – The Lost King

William Friedkin – The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

Matt Johnson & Matthew Miller – BlackBerry

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer

 

Best Cinematography:

 

Xavi Giménez – Marlowe

Hong Sang-soo – in water

Hoyte van Hoytema – Oppenheimer

Artur Tort – Pacifiction

Łukasz Żal – The Zone of Interest

 

Best Film Editing:

James Vanewater – Infinity Pool

Kirk Baxter – The Killer

Thelma Schoonmaker – Killers of the Flower Moon

Jennifer Lame – Oppenheimer

Sarah Flack – Priscilla

 

Best Sound:

 

The Exorcist: Believer

Ferrari

The Killer

Oppenheimer

The Zone of Interest

Best Visual Effects:

 

Beau Is Afraid

Gran Turismo

Infinity Pool

The Killer

Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire

 

Best Production Design:

 

Asteriod City

Beau Is Afraid

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Oppenheimer

 

Best Original Score:

 

Joe Hisaishi – The Boy and the Heron

Hong Sang-soo – in water / Walk Up

Devonté Hynes – Master Gardener

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – The Killer

Robbie Robertson – Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Best Original Song:

 

“Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven)” – Cast, Asteroid City

“Evening Mirror” – Paul Grimstad & Talia Ryder, The Sweet East

"Speed Drive" – Charli XCX, Barbie

“What Was I Made For?” – Billie Eilish, Barbie

voicemail birthday song – Shin Seok-ho, in water

 

Best International Film:

 

Afire

Fallen Leaves

in water

Pacifiction

Scarlet

 

Best Animated Film:

 

The Boy and the Heron

 

Best Documentary:

 

De humani corporis fabrica

Godard Cinema

The History of the Minnesota Vikings

 

Best Short Film:

 

The Daughters of Fire

Passing Time

The Swan

Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Monday, February 12, 2024

Strange and Beautiful: On Paul Schrader’s Forever Mine (1999)

A few weeks ago a friend hipped me to a place that was accepting submissions for a series on the year 1999 in cinema, and on a lark I decided to whip up a piece just before the deadline. Why not? I'd have an excuse to force myself to write something again finally and perhaps pocket a few bucks along the way. Well, it was rejected, so I remain untainted by the world of paid film criticism, and my blog gains its first piece of writing in over a year. I call that a win. But anyway, here's the piece, on Paul Schrader's Forever Mine (1999):



Despite Paul Schrader’s status as a longtime Hollywood maverick (the “writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull” tag follows him wherever his name appears) and his recent resurgence in public film circles —thanks in part to both his latest three-film run of boundary-pushing cinematic objects and his increasingly infamous and unfiltered Facebook posting—a wide swath of his career remains woefully underseen, underdiscussed, and underappreciated. Particularly the 20 years or so leading up to First Reformed (2017), his first critical hit since the Oscar-nominated Affliction (1997), and the current mold for what most people probably think of as a “Paul Schrader film.” One reason for that long lapse in critical attention is perhaps the fact that most of the films during that stretch are not what one thinks of as a Paul Schrader film: a loopy alternate-reality TV film (Witch Hunt, 1994), a strange sex dramedy biopic (Auto Focus, 2002), an IP horror film prequel (Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, 2005), a bizarre Holocaust survivor drama (Adam Resurrected, 2008), and not one but two Nicolas Cage action potboilers (Dying of the Light, 2014; Dog Eat Dog, 2016), to name just a few. But while Schrader’s more talked-about interests seem to point in the direction of a filmmaker content to make the same film over and over again, as the list of his Pickpocket (1959)-influenced films attests (at least six, and all of his last three), there is a side of him just as strongly if not more strongly attracted to projects flamboyant in their uniqueness. In a 1985 interview Schrader points to Stanley Kubrick as a “shining example” for him: “Every time he makes a film you know it will be an outrageous forage into an original world. That’s much more interesting than to keep refining the same movie, over and over.”

An outrageous forage into an original world. That Schrader gave this quote to Roger Ebert at 2 a.m. over a glass of whiskey at the time of the Toronto Film Festival premiere of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) probably goes some way in understanding what Schrader’s headspace was like at the time. Unfortunately, Schrader came onto the film directing scene just as Hollywood was beginning to shift from its decade or so of relatively open-minded production philosophies post-studio system collapse into a more bureaucratic, money-minded mode of operation—outrageous forages into original worlds were no longer, if they ever were, the kind of movies that attracted financing. But that didn’t stop Schrader from doing it all the same, cobbling resources together from wherever he could and making his outrageous best of whatever material he found himself working on.

After a relatively successful first decade of filmmaking, directing assignments were tough to come by in the 1990s for Schrader. Light Sleeper (1992) was turned down by production companies left and right before Schrader put up his own money for the first three weeks of pre-production, taking deferred payment along with star Willem Dafoe and others in order to maximize their (about half of what was desired) budget. In order to introduce himself to the young film executives who knew him only by reputation, and to prove that he wasn’t too “dark” of a filmmaker (a huge no-no for the money people), he took the reins on HBO’s Dennis Hopper-starring Witch Hunt, surely the lightest movie, tone-wise, in the entire Schrader filmography. And then even the Oscars-fêted Affliction (the second Schrader film released in 1997, after the great The Touch) took five years from script to screen due to a lack of interest from financiers, eventually being made only because Nick Nolte took a substantial pay cut to be in it.

Which brings us, finally, to Forever Mine (1999). A film that Schrader, after writing it “a long time” before, had entirely given up on ever making. He had very much wanted to make it, had always wanted to, but by the time he got the opportunity to do so he was much a different person, and in much different era. This clash of timing perhaps accounts for part of the reason why it’s one of the most derided films Schrader ever made. In Vulture’s ranked accounting of the Schrader filmography in 2018, Forever Mine came in dead last. Even Schrader himself doesn’t hold the highest opinion of it—at the time of cast member Ray Liotta’s passing, Schrader memorialized him in a Facebook post reading: “RIP Ray. Wish I could have made a better film for both our sakes.”

But anyone familiar with Schrader’s tossed-off comments about this that or the next thing knows that as often as he can make a provocative and interesting point, he can just as often float an opinion that’s miles away from the truth.

From the second Forever Mine started to make its way from a script idea to a filmic reality, it was doomed to be misunderstood; it never stood a chance. The plotline alone begs to be laughed at, the way you would chuckle reading the back of a paperback romance novel: a young cabana boy (Joseph Fiennes) falls in love with a newly married trophy wife (Gretchen Mol) and her husband (Ray Liotta) tries to have him murdered. He survives and, under a false identity, reenters their lives 16 years later to claim the love that he believes was fated to be his.

But a film is not its script, and cinema is an art capable of creating a vibrant world that goes far, far beyond the printed word. Apt for a film that had been conceived years and years before it was made, Forever Mine has absolutely nothing to do with the prevailing cultural moods of 1990s cinema. There is nothing cool about Forever Mine. There is nothing “hip” about it. There is not a single bone of irony in its body. Its full-throated earnestness in the face of romantic cliché was miles removed from the prevailing attitudes of the time, harkening back to an era of Hollywood cinema when you could go to the theatre and watch giant close-ups of beautiful actors pretending to be in love and, amidst its obvious fakeness, be nevertheless moved at the overwhelming realness of it all. “I went back to the cinema of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray,” Schrader would say at the film’s 1999 festival premiere. Back to “the romantic hero, the nineteenth-century hero.”



 

The film’s capital-R Romanticism is unmistakable. Despite being guided by the steady hand of the mature Schrader, it’s clearly the brainchild of a version of Schrader from when he was “very much that kind of obsessional, romantic young man,” in his words. Perhaps the same young man who wrote the script for Obsession (1976), his friend Brian De Palma’s re-working of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) that traffics in the same kind of suffusive, ultra-passionate moods, as well as sharing Forever Mine’s head-held-high acceptance of plot contrivances as narrative tools. Schrader was famously frustrated with De Palma for getting rid of the ending he had written, so Forever Mine could be seen as Schrader’s chance to finally direct that same kind of film without having to answer to anyone but himself. And what Schrader has said about Obsession is directly relevant here: “The thing that intrigued me most was the notion of creating a love story so strong that you could transgress the boundaries of time without jarring the audience. The love story could be so strong that the audience would allow you to go into the future to tell it.”

This is exactly what Forever Mine does. Its opening scene shows us Fiennes, right side of his face heavily scarred, clutching a rosary, in 1989, before taking us via dissolve and voiceover to 16 years in the past, Fiennes now a strapping young cabana boy at the opening of his second season on the job at a castle-like beachside resort. Every time the film makes this time-jumping maneuver, it feels less like a flashback and more like Proustian reverie. Fiennes’ scarred face holds so much memory and longing that even the simplest medium shot of him sitting on a plane is drenched in pathos. The feeling of watching the film’s 1973-set scenes is the feeling of being enveloped in an overwhelmingly strong memory, where physical sensations and emotional shockwaves come flooding back in stark detail. Just witness the stunning introduction of Gretchen Mol’s character, who Fiennes sees emerging from the water in a white bathing suit, Schrader filming it like it’s the birth of Venus, a goddess rising from the sea. Time slows down; his world is rewired, rewritten. Love at first sight, nothing will be the same again, etc.—except the force with which Schrader films this and the couple’s first encounters erases cliché and brings it to the level of romantic transcendence, where as a viewer you sit slack-jawed with eyes wide open awaiting the next reverse shot like it’s the only thing in the world that matters.

As a good filmmaker will, Schrader accomplishes all of this nearly wordlessly, and before you know it you’ve fallen under the spell of the film and its romance despite seemingly the bare minimum being provided in the way of explanation or character motivation. Much credit must of course go to the performers, who stand tall amidst this rapid gravitational whirlwind and share soul-deep desires and reluctancies with nothing but their faces, voices, bodies. Mol plays her beauty with both a charming radiance and a moral seriousness, variously holding up and buckling underneath the pressures of her duties and desires with a sensitivity and grace that belies the difficulty of playing character such as hers—like if Emma Bovary was trapped in a B-movie. (One of her most moving scenes is her reading Flaubert’s novel aloud to older women at a nursing home.) Fiennes on the other hand gives one of the most intense performances I’ve ever seen—all furrowed brows, soul-searching eyes, and a voice that seems to come from some hidden part of him, his dialogue eked out in a closed-mouth whisper, strong, earnest. He simmers and smolders, his body statuesque, his presence in the flashbacks like a romance novel cover model stripped of all cheesiness, and his presence in the contemporary scenes—absurd accent and cover identity and all—like something out of a gothic vampire film.


 

Traversing hints of the monster movie, of noir, even of soap opera, Forever Mine is ultimately melodrama through and through. The tension of the narrative in the end becomes a matter of whether or not Fiennes will reveal himself to Mol, and whether or not it will result in the long-fated consummation of his desire to be with her forever. The emotional climax of the film—its melodramatic moment of catharsis—is Mol’s recognition of who Fiennes actually is. The scene is almost frightening in its only-in-the-movies-ness, but it’s played so straight that, like the rest of the film, the question of realism is (or at least should be) the furthest thing from one’s mind. Fiennes enters Mol’s house when nobody is home and places his rosary (the one she gave him as a parting gift all those years ago) on her nightstand. He backs into the shadows, waiting. She arrives and sees his car; she knows he’s there. She says she’ll call the police; he tells her not to. He then emerges from the darkness, and their encounter climaxes with Fiennes dropping the accent, Mol shocked and overcome, their emotions splayed across the floor and each other, embracing, 16 years of waiting and wondering condensed into a single moment. Part of what pushes this over into pure transcendence, rather than the ostensibly eye-rolling contrivance it appears to be on paper, is the music of Angelo Badalamenti, in his third collaboration with Schrader. His work here is intensely operatic, pure yearning and longing and desire in the form of sweeping orchestral compositions; probably most famous for “Laura Palmer’s Theme” from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the main theme in Forever Mine—present at this climactic moment—is strings not synths, but has a similar emotional effect via a rising... rising... rising... melody where the music slowly tips over into an impossibly emotional place, a place where you have no choice but to surrender and give yourself over to what’s unfolding in front of you.

Everything about the movie is coordinated to maximize the emotional impact of the film’s simple two-people-fall-in-love-but-can’t-be-together storyline. Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey spare no expense in creating a world that’s half dream, half memory; hazy, glowing surfaces in a 4:3 frame (another throwback to maximize the classical Hollywood moods), the hot sun of the Florida beach setting giving everything a sparkling, otherworldly aura. Which is all designed to make it seem like Fiennes and Mol are the two most beautiful people in the world, that not even fate can prevent their dreams becoming reality. It all draws you in, making you lean forward in your seat just to get a whiff of the intoxicating aroma of the film’s romance. It’s old Hollywood escapism at its finest: not making you forget the world, but so forcibly drawing you into its own heightened fantasy world that you lose yourself in the unfolding drama, reality intermingling with unreality towards the purpose of experiencing emotions realer than real. Schrader’s liberal use of dissolves furthers this sense of unreality, morphing time to the will of the drama itself. When Fiennes is framed for a crime by Liotta to get him out of the way, he spends his time in prison writing love letter after love letter to Mol; Schrader edits the sequence into a dynamic montage of images and voiceover, letting the cuts and dissolves actively convey the emotional weight of the letters rather than letting the words do all the work. The close-ups during the film’s emotional climax are the kind of thing cinema was invented for, the kind of thing that single-handedly justifies the practice of watching movies in the dark on 40-foot-tall screens.



 

It's ironic, then, that Forever Mine wouldn’t actually be released in movie theatres at all. The film premiered at TIFF in 1999, but distribution offers weren’t enough to cover the $18 million budget; production company J&M Entertainment was forced to file for bankruptcy and the insurers ended up selling Forever Mine to the cable TV channel Starz as part of a package with a handful of other unreleased films from the company. So it wouldn’t be until a year after its premiere that the film appeared on television in 2000; a DVD release followed in 2001. (It’s appropriate, then, that today the easiest way to see the film is watching it free with ads on a number of streaming websites, such as Tubi.)

The film somehow seems to wear it’s disregarded-ness proudly, as it had never been destined for zietgeisty popular status from the moment it went into production. “The film I wanted to make should have been made ten years before. It had lost its historical slot,” said Schrader. In a culture that was becoming increasingly ironically detached, in a medium and industry that was beginning to undergo its most seismic change since the switch to talkies (Schrader’s old friend George Lucas had just released The Phantom Menace), Forever Mine was a cinematic object that just didn’t belong. A classical, romantic melodrama with an almost religious fervor, desire and memory writ large over every scene, a work of expressionistic art at the crossroads of Flaubert and Proust. Perhaps audiences just weren’t equipped to encounter a film that made good on the quote that opens it, from 19th century English literary critic Walter Pater: “It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.” If there’s two things Forever Mine absolutely is, it’s beautiful and strange—given its vibes forward filmmaking, I think audiences today are in a better place to appreciate it than ever before. It’s a clear cousin of a different strange and beautiful 1999 film, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, another tale of lust and desire that audiences and critics mostly didn’t take to at the time—a fellow outrageous forage into an original world, to bring it full circle with Schrader’s appreciation of Kubrick. That was Kubrick’s last film, and 25 years later the aging Schrader may finally be gearing up to make his own last film, if his recent Facebook declaration that “Everytime I think I’m ready to die I come up with a new script idea” is any indication. Eyes Wide Shut has rightfully had its reputation restored amongst cinephiles for the masterpiece that it is; I impatiently await the day that the same can be said for Forever Mine. 




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