Cinema is not my life. Living is.
– Ermanno Olmi
The two best films I’ve seen that premiered in 2021 are Cry Macho and Drive My Car.
But that statement means nothing, really, except for announcing something subjective about myself which mostly remains invisible.
I say that because it’s difficult for me to believe that all of the reasons why I like Cry Macho are the same as all of the reasons why other people like Cry Macho (which some people like, but not a ton) or that all of the reasons I like Drive My Car are the same as all of the reasons why other people like Drive My Car (which a ton of people like, except some). This may seem obvious, but I mention it not only because I imagine the reasons why I like them differs from others, but because I don’t think I would even agree with others about what they are.
To me, Cry Macho and Drive My Car are beyond cinema. I don’t like calling them “films,” except as a shorthand, because my personal experience with them went far beyond what I imagine when I think of what a film is: let’s say, sounds and images spread across a certain length of time. A movie ends when it’s over. For me, Cry Macho and Drive My Car didn’t end when they were over.
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I saw Cry Macho four months ago and I saw Drive My Car four days ago. Both in theatres (a local multiplex for the former, a local arthouse for the latter). I was quite moved at points during both films, but both times somewhat soon after I left the theatre I became absolutely, undeniably emotionally overwhelmed just thinking about the films. The first time I was sitting in my car in the driveway of the place where I was staying the night. The second time I was walking the city streets in a kind of post-screening reverie. The point is, the incredible profundity that I find in these two works didn’t hit me until I re-entered the world, both literally and figuratively. I had to think about them not as films but as things which exist vis-à-vis my own life, my own existence.
Doing this immediately puts to rest any thoughts of “best” or “good” or “bad” or, God forbid, “grade” or “score” or “star rating” or “ranking” or anything like that. No—there is merely a film in front of you (wait—not “film,” but rather, let’s say, an encounter) which exists in the world in which you live. What does it mean for my life. What does it offer to me—or, what can I offer to it. In other words: how can I maximize my vulnerability in order to maximize my edification, or, how can I make this mean the most for my life as possible.
I’ve had four months to sit with Cry Macho (and I’ve watched it again just now), and I’ve already occasionally thrown some thoughts out there on ways I’ve been thinking about it. But one point that keeps coming up, in contradistinction to ways I’ve seen some other people think about it, is that it doesn’t need to be “good” to be good. It has no requirement to be the kind of movie, or even the “quality” of movie, that one thinks movies are or should be.
This is easy enough to point out with a somewhat obviously misshapen (“misshapen”) film like Cry Macho, but something about Drive My Car has led me to think of it in a somewhat similar manner. As hinted at before, the fact that it has earned seemingly universal praise (the reason for which I have an inkling, see below) doesn’t mean the praise I wish to give it is necessarily of the same kind, or for the same reason, that others have. So I shy away a bit from the overwhelmingly positive response for that reason, and perhaps also because of my natural distaste for “awards” being given to works of art, or to anything or anybody for that matter.
Is Drive My Car “deserving” of all of the awards it has won? Sure. But recognizing this fact irks me a little bit, because that immediately legitimizes not only the idea of artistic competition (objectively nonexistent, ontologically) but also of Drive My Car being a “film” in the first place (subjectively objectionable, phenomenologically). It feels wrong to reduce an irreducibly complex encounter that I had to a tidbit fact about what random city’s voting body officially recognized the work as “best” whatever.
But Drive My Car seems to be so solidly and elegantly constructed, as opposed to Cry Macho’s apparent bumpiness, so it seems a little odder that I would also call into question that film’s need to be “good” in order to be good. Maybe the reason is already clear: it’s because this fact stands for all films. I merely choose these two because they both catalyzed a specific kind of emotional reaction in me, in a specific kind of way, that I can’t recall any other films ever doing. Of course, there are a million complexities that go into these reactions occurring completely unrelated to the films themselves, but I digress....
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The reason I chose to look at these two films together doesn’t stop there. Yes, they’re both 2021 films. Yes, they’re my two favorite of that kind. Yes, they even both have commands as titles, and largely consist of two people driving in a car.
To me, Cry Macho and Drive My Car make the world seem bigger. (This statement is some kind of attempt to offer a vaguely poetic remark that secretly encompasses a thousand things that I don’t have the time to articulate right now....)
It’s maybe interesting to note that Eastwood has perhaps been the most beloved American filmmaker in Japan for the last half-century, and that Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who was a teacher of Hamaguchi’s and with whom he co-wrote the script of last year’s Wife of a Spy (2020), is on the record as an admirer of Eastwood, or that Hamaguchi himself put Hereafter (2010) on his list of his ten favorite films from the last ten years, or that Hamaguchi’s 38-minute Heaven Is Still Far Away (2016) could very well be seen as a remake of that same film.
Here’s a cliché that I’m simply going to use untouched and ask that the reader become vulnerable to its truth nonetheless: both films are about the value of human connection. I was very struck, in Drive My Car, by the use of language. Of languages, plural, that is. Of Japanese, English, Korean, German, Tagalog, Indonesian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Malaysian. And Korean Sign Language, which much of the film’s beauty in its dealings with language hinge on, as it both acts as a kind of punchline to the film’s funniest joke as well as the medium by which the profound climax of the film is communicated. Sign language plays a small but beautiful role in Cry Macho as well: one of the little girls that Clint befriends is deaf, and he understands her signings—“just a little something I picked up along the way,” he says modestly.
Of course the use of English and Spanish, and of broken English and poorly accentuated Spanish, permeates Cry Macho, and becomes beautiful in a similar way to Drive My Car in how language exists as a barrier to communication and yet can so easily be overcome—by translation, by looks, by gestures, by intuition, etc. I say it as the highest compliment of both films that they make me eager to continue and expand my language studies, just as they make me want to talk to strangers more, just as they make me want to do my best to love everyone I encounter on my path through life. They make my heart feel more open, and I don’t feel embarrassed to say something like that which could so easily be misconstrued as cloyingly sentimental.
The apotheosis of this idea of language and communication shattering borders thought to be closed comes in the form of a light joke in one of the final moments of Cry Macho: as the young boy walks to his father and is reunited on the other side of the Mexican-American border, Macho the rooster crows something and Clint looks at it and says, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” It is as if the final language barrier had been crossed. I guess he picked that one up along the way, too....
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If I still haven’t offered much that could be considered concrete as to why I value these two movies so deeply, at a certain point it becomes an issue of how much one is willing to share.
This gets at a bigger problem, which I would call the impossibility of writing about film in public forums. I can write about films at some length, if I choose to, without divulging personal information or sharing details of my personal beliefs. Some hints of these things naturally come through; how could they not. But at a certain point I have to stop simply because there is a time and place for sharing these things, and doing so online to a bunch of strangers with wildly converging belief systems is rarely one of those places.
Of course these deeply personal things are inseparable from my reactions to films, these two especially. The contents of my thoughts and emotions during the half hour or so after seeing these two movies is something that will only ever be known by myself and maybe some of my closest friends. They are intensely subjective.
I can perhaps hint, via one small and seemingly trivial example, at what I mean. If you’ve seen Drive My Car, you’ll know that the age of 23 becomes significant for the story. I myself was 23 when this film was first released. To deepen the subjective resonance even further, I, too, like the character of that age, have spent much of my working life driving a car. This is just one example of something small, and which of course will not be a shared resonance with all viewers.
But even something bigger—like, let’s say, the theme of bearing one’s suffering, and longing for rest from it—can, although certainly an experience shared by everyone (here’s where I suggest we could maybe locate the near unanimous love of the film), can still be a theme experienced intensely subjectively, so much so that one’s personal takeaway is unlikely to be something necessarily intended by the film, and almost certainly something not believed by the film’s maker himself.
At the beginning of Cry Macho’s most moving scene, Clint and teenage actor Eduardo Minett hole up in a Catholic shrine. “Do you believe in God?” Clint’s answer of “I don’t know” is consistent with what he know of Eastwood’s beliefs, a question at the very foundation of his making of Hereafter, which I recall him answering in a similar fashion as he does in Cry Macho on a special feature of the film’s DVD.
Drive My Car’s interpolation of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, especially the final monologue communicated via Korean Sign Language, is very much about God, too, and His relation to human suffering. To me, these final lines become very much a profound expression of the Christian faith, that for the Christian, earthly suffering will one day find its cessation in the eternity of heaven—“we shall rest.” To another, these lines probably mean something else, or something less specific, or in any case something less theological. Far be it from me to let Armond White speak for anybody, but I just googled “Ryûsuke Hamaguchi religion” and stumbled upon this suggestion from him: “Adding a deaf-mute actress to deliver Sonya’s famous closing lines is shameless, but PC reviewers don’t respond to the beautiful Christian faith, only to this production’s emphasis on pity. Or as Yusuke summarizes it: ‘We’ll be okay.’”
Just having his words in this piece makes me a little ashamed, but it was mostly coincidental and it offers a good enough suggestion as to what other people might be responding to. Which isn’t to say they are wrong for responding to it in that way, as by all indication that’s probably closer to what Hamaguchi’s intended meaning was. (Chekov’s, too—by all accounts it seems he was an atheist in the final years of his life in which Uncle Vanya was written.) One can only respond to something through the medium of one’s own worldview. It just so happens that my own worldview stumbled upon an idea so profoundly important to me that I didn’t care whether or not it was intended to be read that way, and simply chose to embrace it as I would if it were. This is part of how we make the art rather than the art making us, so to speak, and goes back to everything I’ve been talking about re: subjectivity and what makes a film “good” and/or good.
But to continue along the lines of my subjective thinking, there’s something about both Cry Macho and Drive My Car that moves me to not segregate myself from those of differing beliefs than I, but rather to see them from a perspective more divine than my own. In that Cry Macho scene I was taking about the kid goes on to mock the idea that “we’re all God’s children,” to which Clint responds, “Well, we’re all somebody’s children, kid,” an evasion of the question that also accidentally answers it in the affirmative. And in Drive My Car’s final monologue, there’s the line that “when our last hour comes we shall meet it humbly, and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter, and God will have pity on us.”
These two moments, these two parallel ideas that were never intended as direct statements of belief, become for me some kind of accidental—and therefore beautiful—reminder that every single person at every single second exists under God’s infinite mercy, and therefore should exist under whatever mercy and love I possess as well.
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I’ve accidentally found myself treading further than I intended into areas of thought which are unfashionable and perhaps controversial if not outright objectionable to some. And which directly contradict my previously stated desire to not get too personal. Forgive me.
But while I’m here I’m going to end with a quote from Søren Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes de Silentio, from his Fear and Trembling, the quote which I recalled as I walked along the streets after seeing Drive My Car, which I attempted and failed in the cold to bring up on my phone in the form of the screenshot I had taken over two years prior, which—if nothing else—provides a very odd and probably unheard-of closing point for a piece of writing about two so-called movies, which should at the very least be interesting if not a tiny bit edifying to anyone who is still reading at this point:
But he who loves God has no need of tears, no need of admiration, in his love he forgets his suffering, yea, so completely has he forgotten it that afterwards there would not even be the least inkling of his pain if God Himself did not recall it, for God sees in secret and knows the distress and counts the tears and forgets nothing.
