→ January 2, 2019
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Custody.

Custody (Jusqu’à la garde, on amazon and iTunes) is a full-length sequel to the Oscar-nominated short film Just Before Losing Everything, both written and directed by Xavier Legrand and starring the same actors in three of the four main roles. This film, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and the Louis Delluc Prize last year, follows the same family from the custody hearing that opens the film through the father’s attempts to control his estranged wife through their twelve-year-old son, building in intensity through its refusal to acquiesce to the commercial impulse toward big, dramatic moments.

The opening scene has Miriam (Léa Drucker) and Antoine (Denis Ménochet), with their lawyers, in a session where each side argues for their desired custody arrangements, which form the only real disagreement between them. Miriam accuses Antoine of abusing her, and has repeatedly changed phone numbers and often hidden her location to protect herself from him. Their daughter, Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux), is about to turn 18, and wants nothing to do with her father. Julien (Thomas Gioria), their son, also wants no contact with his father, but the judge who hears their arguments grants Antoine the visitation rights he wants – apparently dismissing Miriam’s claims of abuse for lack of ‘proof’ – which gives the father the wedge he needs to insinuate himself into Miriam’s life.

The film is spare, just 93 minutes, and even at that length there is little action and a very simple plot, reminiscent in several ways of 2017’s Loveless. Antoine is manipulative and controlling, and his interest in Julien seems limited to using the boy as a way to maintain contact with Miriam and to remain aware of her whereabouts and actions. Gioria is especially strong as a twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t want contact with his father, but also fears him and has the innate respect children have for authority figures, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re also the victims of those same adults. Some of Custody‘s strongest scenes involve Julien and Antoine doing very little, often barely speaking to each other, or Antoine demanding something only to have Julien try his hardest to avoid answering, and they’re excruciating because Legrand lets these interactions play out in something very close to real time. When Antoine demands that Julien show him their new apartment, Legrand puts us in the car the whole time as Julien tries to direct his father, left, right, straight ahead, for twice as long as you’d expect, giving more time for the anticipation of an eventual explosion to build up.

You don’t need to see the prior film to follow Custody, although it will color your view of the characters in the first few scenes; without that prologue, you can more easily see the judge’s point of view that she must figure out “which of (the parents) is the bigger liar.” It doesn’t take much time to see Antoine’s character come through – first the need to control his wife and children, then his temper and his manipulative nature, and eventually the violence – and at that point anyone watching will realize how badly the judge screwed up, and, in what I assume is Legrand’s point, how poorly the French custody process serves abuse victims if there isn’t an actual crime on record already.

Ménochet also delivers a tremendous performance here even before Antoine’s violent side starts to surface – I’d argue that the performance is better until then, because once it becomes physical, there’s less for the actor to do with the role. Legrand didn’t write this character as a sympathetic one, but also avoided completely dehumanizing the man, so that the scenes with Antoine and Julien can still work as drama – you can understand the son still seeing this man as his father, someone who says he loves him, and an authority figure, rather than just a monster. An adult would see through Antoine, but his own child will always have that inner conflict, and giving the father enough depth gives the audience Julien’s lenses to see him.

Custody has one of the best conclusions of any film I’ve seen from 2018, although it could trigger anyone sensitive to scenes of domestic violence. Given what has come before, it might be the only authentic climax to the story, and then Legrand had his choice of resolutions from that inflection point. By choosing to tell this story slowly, showing detail where most films would speed up to the next moment of action, Legrand has made a film that feels distinctly non-commercial, but that also should evoke more genuine emotions in the audience until that final scene – and by that point, the direction and the acting have earned a big payoff. It’s one of the best films of the year, probably borderline top ten for me right now, and deserves a wider audience here than it’s gotten.

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→ January 1, 2019
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If Beale Street Could Talk.

If Beale Street Could Talk feels like a film that is very of the moment, for its theme and its source material. James Baldwin is himself having a renaissance after the acclaimed documentary I Am Not Your Negro appeared in 2016 and contemporary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have explicitly alluded to Baldwin’s works, such as Fire. Even though the novel on which Barry Jenkins, director of the Oscar-winning Moonlight, was written over 40 years ago, it revolves around a very current theme of racial injustice and police misconduct towards African-American men. It succeeds without sermonizing by wrapping those huge themes in a very sweet, straightforward love story between two young black people played by rising stars.

Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James of Homecoming) and Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne, making her film debut) are childhood friends who’ve fallen in love in 1970s New York City, but whose relationship faces many obstacles, including the most obvious one – a society that views them as second-class citizens because they’re black. As the film opens, we learn that Tish, just 19, is pregnant, and that Fonny is behind bars, accused of a rape that he didn’t commit, put there by a vengeful white cop. Jenkins alternates scenes of the present day, where Tish and her family work to try to clear Fonny’s name, with long, languid scenes of their nascent romance, mostly from Tish’s point of view as she also learns more about who Fonny has become as an adult and the challenges a young black man faces, even in a multicultural place like New York.

The story hits a wall when Tish’s mom, played by Regina King, travels to Puerto Rico to try to convince the victim to revoke her identification of Fonnie as the rapist. The scenes that follow are important to the plot, but the lyrical mood Jenkins has set hits an abrupt stop the moment she steps on the island, and it takes the rest of the movie, until the concluding scene, to get that atmosphere back. There’s also an utterly corny scene where Dave Franco, dressed as an observant Jew named Levy, delivers a monologue to Fonnie and Tish to explain why he might be the one landlord in the whole city willing to rent an apartment to a young black couple. The soliloquy is hackneyed, right down to the whole “I don’t care what color you are, black, white, purple” line that could be borrowed from any of a thousand films where a white character tries to explain how he doesn’t see color.

King has been listed as a shoo-in for a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Beale Street, but I don’t think she’s in this film enough to have that sort of impact. She’d slip in under the Judi Dench Exemption, I suppose, but King isn’t the Queen, and her character is actually not that well-developed. There’s nothing missing from King’s performance, but the script just doesn’t demand enough of her. James and Layne are both outstanding, and Bryan Tyree Henry, who is having a year himself, is strong again, this time as a friend of Fonny’s who was just paroled after serving two years for a crime he didn’t commit, but to which he pled guilty rather than face a more serious charge for marijuana possession. (This remains a major reason African-American men are incarcerated today, but first appeared as a weapon of the state, often with the support of leaders of black communities, in the 1960s and 1970s. Locking Up Our Own, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, documents this trend and its effects on the African-American population.)

Jenkins made several smart decisions that power Beale Street past its flaws and made it one of my top ten movies of 2018, including the choice to retain some of Baldwin’s original prose, often having Tish use it as narration; and the way he maintains much of that glowing atmosphere even into some of the scenes around Fonny’s incarceration and the efforts to clear him. Keeping that mood into early conversations that Tish and Fonny have through glass while he’s in prison makes the scene where he loses control of himself more visceral, and the early scene that you’ve likely seen in the trailer, where the two families come into conflict because Fonny’s mother blames Tish for leading her son into sin, starts out with the same atmosphere only to dissolve as the rancor in the room overtakes it. Between this and Moonlight, Jenkins has made his style very clear – he’s in no rush, often letting scenes breathe longer than any other contemporary director I can name, and when he does take the wheel, such as for close-up shots of specific characters’ faces, you’ll be aware of the transition.

If Beale Street Could Talk seems destined to earn a slew of nominations at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony and lose just about all of them; its best chance, aside from King as Best Supporting Actress, might be in Best Adapted Screenplay, where it will be up against A Star is Born and BlacKkKlansman, although I’d vote for this over both of those. If any film has a chance to upset A Star is Born for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, this would be it. It is a wonderful film, so kind to its two main characters but with a story that will make you seethe by its end, worth seeking out if Annapurna gives it a wider release beyond just the 65 screens it was on this past weekend.

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→ December 31, 2018
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Top ten movies of 2018.

I’ve seen everything I think would likely make this top ten list other than several foreign titles, including Cold War and Capernaum, although I’ll still continue watching 2018 releases for a few more months as they hit theaters or streaming. I’ve seen 40 movies that count as 2018 theatrical releases, not counting the HBO movie The Tale, which would have made my top ten but isn’t eligible for awards because it went straight to television after the network purchased it at Sundance.

With those caveats in place, here’s my top ten as of this morning, and it still could change as I continue to see more 2018 films this winter. Links on the films’ titles go to my reviews.

10. The Endless. A thriller, or perhaps a psychological horror movie, that garnered positive reviews with a modest release, The Endless follows two brothers who, having escaped a cult where they grew up, revisit the compound to try to find some closure, only to discover that a mysterious presence has kept their old cultmates from aging and seems to prevent anyone from leaving.

9. First Man. Considered something of a box-office flop, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land goes in a completely different direction, telling the quiet, almost painfully restrained story of Neil Armstrong, from the death of his young daughter to cancer to his landing on the moon. Ryan Gosling and Clare Foy are excellent as the two leads, although the emphasis on accuracy in depicting space flight made some scenes very hard for me to watch.

8. Isle of Dogs. This should win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, although I fear the silly Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse will win (I admit Spider-ham is pretty funny, though) instead. Wes Anderson’s second animated film, his first from an original story, is brilliant, emotional in the right ways, often funny, and extremely well-voiced by a cast of Wes usuals along with the welcome addition of Bryan Cranston.

7. The Favourite. Yorgis Lanthimos’ follow-up to the The Lobster is a bawdy, lowbrow comedy in nice clothes, and it’s hilarious, thanks to the combined efforts of Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz, all three of whom deserve awards consideration. The story itself isn’t new – it’s a power struggle combined with a bizarre love triangle – but the dialogue sparkles and the three stars, aided by a strong supporting turn from Nicholas Hoult, all slay in their respective roles.

6. If Beale Street Could Talk. A lovely, languid adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, Beale Street stars Stephan James (of Homecoming) and Kiki Layne as young lovers who find they’re expecting just as he’s headed to jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

5. You Were Never Really Here. A taut modern noir thriller, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a damaged private eye who rescues kidnapped girls and ends up caught in a case that threatens his safety and his sanity. Lynne Ramsay’s latest film, her first feature since 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, clocks in at a spare 90 minutes, leaving no slack in the tension.

4. Beast. Driven by a star turn by relative newcomer Jessie Buckley, Beast follows a young woman in her late 20s who falls for the local outcast, who is himself a potential suspect in the murders of three other teenaged girls in their small town. The contrast between the idyllic setting and the darkness throughout the plot further drives the viewer’s sense of unease at every turn.

3. Shoplifters. My top three films are all foreign films, which is purely coincidental, and all made the Academy Award’s shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2019 Oscars. Japan’s entry is a simple, intimate portrait of a makeshift family of grifters who take in a neglected four-year-old girl they find playing outside in the cold in their tenement. Director/writer Hirokazu Kore-eda took hold the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this film, which has a huge heart and explores the essentially human need for the connections and security of family through a group of well-rounded characters.

2. Roma. Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project for Netflix lived up to the lofty expectations set for it. Based on his own childhood in Mexico City, including the life of his nanny/housekeeper Cleo, Roma is told from her perspective, as she gets pregnant by a man who abandons her and sees the marriage of her employers crumble, all amidst the tumult of protest-torn Mexico in the early 1970s. The story can be a shade slow, and Cleo is the only real character of depth, but the cinematography is the best of the year – maybe in several years – and the film seems set to win awards for its sound as well.

1. Burning. Adapted from a scant Haruki Murakami story called “Barn Burning,” this Korean-language film creates an air of uncertainty from the start, and its three main characters remain unknowable to the dramatic conclusion. Lee Jong-su meets a girl, Shin Hae-mi, who says she knew him in grade school, and after a few days he’s clearly in love with her, only to have her go to Africa on a trip and ask him to watch her cat for her. When she comes back, she’s with a suave, wealthy guy, Ben, who might be her new boyfriend, and Jong-su can’t figure out what to do – or what exactly Ben does for his strange hobby. It’s a hypnotic slow burner anchored by one of the year’s best performances from Steven Yeun as Ben.

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→ December 30, 2018
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Minding the Gap.

As much as the awards-season conversation has been dominated by Netflix (for Roma) and amazon (for several TV series, including the very good Homecoming), Hulu has quietly had a banner year as well by moving into documentaries, with two of its properties making the shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. One of them, Minding the Gap, seems like a lock for a nomination given its universal acclaim and the timeliness of its subject, exploring the lives of three young men in Rockford, Illinois, all skateboarders and all products of traumatic childhoods.

Bing Liu is the filmmaker and one of the three subjects, having begun filming his friends as they skateboarded around Rockford as preteens and continued it in his early 20s (Liu is 24 now) with both interview footage and scenes from their daily lives. The two other main subjects are Zack Milligan, a handsome, volatile kid of 21 or 22 who now has a son with his 18-year-old girlfriend Nina (also a product of a violent home); and Keire Johnson, an African-American kid who can pile systemic and tacit racism on top of the challenges he already faced from a traumatic upbringing. The three men all respond to the challenges of their lives in different ways, notably Zack, who has become a physically and emotionally abusive partner to Nina and even tries to manipulate their depictions on camera by playing an audio recording of Nina screaming at him without explaining that it was preceded by him physically assaulting her.

As the story progresses, the details of the family lives of all four of these young adults become clear – three grew up in physically abusive environments; Keire lost his father at a young age, while Bing only saw his father three times since age 5. Zack’s childhood is the most opaque, even though he really never shuts up while he’s on camera, and is blessed or cursed with good looks (he reminds me of the ’90s actor Jeremy London) and a self-confidence that convinces him he’s smarter than he really is, which becomes very apparent in a soliloquy later in the film where he justifies his own bad choices by calling people who choose a predictable family life as ‘weak.’ He’s damaged, as all four of the principals (including Nina) are, but he’s also doing the least to cope with it, self-medicating, lashing out physically and emotionally, and stringing Nina along until she finally takes him to court for child support.

The appeal of Minding the Gap is how raw it is, including the footage Liu shot ten years earlier, as well his decision to insert his own story into a narrative that also includes other people. Documentaries seem to follow the either/or path: it’s about your own story (Strong Island) or it’s about someone else’s, but not both. Liu’s history of abuse comes out later in the film, but the arc of his life, including his use of skateboarding as an escape from a bad home situation, dovetails perfectly with those of his friends. And while Liu is occasionally heard interviewing subjects, he’s as unobtrusive in that role as he could be.

Where the film falters is around the three men themselves. Keire and Bing are compelling and sympathetic, but also both reserved by nature, and there’s often a feeling that they’re not revealing as much to the camera as the audience might need to hear from them – especially Keire, who has a mischievous smile he puts on every time he’s lost in thought, even if the thought is unpleasant. Zack, meanwhile, comes off as a real asshole – granted, one with trauma in his own past, someone who probably needs real treatment for PTSD and other mental health issues, but his treatment of Nina and general disregard for others around him is hard to accept even with Bing essentially vouching for his buddy by including his story. He also seems to have a knack for finding women he can manipulate, which comes off particularly poorly as Bing gets Nina’s back story of a horrendous childhood and lack of any kind of family structure until her aunt and uncle take her into their house when she’s 21 and has a 3-year-old in tow.

I personally found the domestic scenes between Zack and Nina excruciating to watch because he is just awful – awful to her, and awful in the way a child trying to act like an adult can be awful. There’s a sense here that Liu is still finding his voice as a documentarian, that he had great material and stumbled on a tremendous subject, but has to learn more about assembling what he collects into a coherent narrative or series of them. Minding the Gap has garnered incredible acclaim to date, with 62 positive reviews for a 100% rating on RottenTomatoes, and the Best Documentary Feature award may come down to this versus Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but I didn’t see it in quite that light. It’s a strong debut that might be the harbinger of a great career for Liu, but it’s also flawed and didn’t do enough to grab and hold my attention throughout its tapestry of three stories.

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→ December 29, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 12/29/18.

I’ve had several ESPN+ pieces in the last two weeks, including my Hall of Fame ballot and explanation, my analyses of the Jurickson Profar trade and that huge Reds-Dodgers trade, and a post that covered the Michael Brantley and Wilson Ramos signings. I held a Klawchat here on the 20th.

On the board game front, my year-end articles went up two weeks ago – my top ten games of 2018 for Paste and my best games by category for Vulture.

Here on the dish, I posted my top 100 songs of 2018 and top 18 albums of 2018 that same week.

My free email newsletter will resume next week. Join the five thousand other satisfied customers who’ve already signed up for occasional goodness.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first, as always: Marc Randazza, a lawyer who represents or has represented several major neo-Nazi and white nationalist figures in lawsuits, has a very long history of legal misconduct, much of it dating from his time working for gay porn producers, but has only received a slap on the wrist from the Nevada Bar for his misdeeds, detailed in this lengthy Huffington Post piece.
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→ December 28, 2018
→ By

A Brief History of Seven Killings.

I’ve been getting reader recommendations for Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, for several years now, including a recommendation from our Twitter friend Old Hoss Radbourn. I’ve even owned the Kindle version of the book for more than a year, picking it up at some point when it was on sale for $2 or $3, but then procrastinating because the book was so long and seemed dense. Well, it is long, it is dense, and there were certainly parts of the reading experience where I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening, but it’s also very good, a transgressive work of postcolonial fiction that takes a strong political stance and weaves a compelling, violent narrative around the real-life assassination attempt against Bob Marley in 1976.

Marley isn’t named in James’ book, referred to throughout merely as the Singer, and his 1976 performance at the Smile Jamaica concert, an event held to try to stop violence between supporters of the two main political parties in Jamaica at the time, is central to the book. Two days before the concert, seven gunmen broke into Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road and shot him, his manager, his wife, and one other member of the Wailers, although somehow there were no fatalities. James works from historical accounts of the assault, including manager Don Taylor’s claims that he attended a street-justice ‘court’ and execution of several of the gunmen, and then populates the narrative with a cast of extraordinary characters – including some of the shooters, Jamaican drug dealers and underworld figures, a white Rolling Stone writer covering the Singer, a woman trying to escape the violence for the United States, and more – to build this sprawling novel where even the good guys are probably bad guys too.

Although the Singer – the shooting, the concert, just his mere existence at the heart of Jamaican culture in that moment – is central to the story, he’s not a character in the book. James shifts his narrative among multiple people, mostly men, and gives many of them individual stories that give their characters depth. (The BBC story on the Man Booker announcement says the book has “more than 75 characters,” but I think about a dozen come through as core characters with three-dimensional depictions, which is still a remarkable number.) James also writes each chapter in the language of the character speaking it, so much of the book is written in a Jamaican patois that slowed me down while reading, and I’d say it took me a hundred or more pages before I got used to the vastly different vocabulary and speech patterns, but that’s also part of the power of the book to evoke a setting and, for me at least, to emphasize that this is a culture and place that is very different from anything I’ve ever experienced and that I shouldn’t judge its characters or events through my lens.

A Brief History of Seven Killings does imply in the title that the book will be violent, but even that did not adequately prepare me for how violent it is – graphic, yes, but also seeming to revel in its own violence. There’s a scene of a massacre in a New York crack house which is pivotal to the plot of the final section of the book but also horrifying in how casual the murders are and how James chooses to describe them in such bloody fashion. There’s a similarly casual attitude on the part of most of the characters towards rape, and a weird mix of outright homophobia and acceptance of some gay or bisexual men among the gang members involved in the assassination attempt. The novel makes heavy use of many gay slurs, one of which is part of Jamaican patois, which I assume is a fair representation of how these characters might have talked but no less jarring to read.

The core themes of James’ novel, opening a window on a pivotal time in modern Jamaican history while exposing the CIA’s suspected role in fomenting this violence and even accelerating the cocaine trade, recalled those of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which did the same for the brutal rule of Dominican dictator Rafael “El Jefe” Trujillo, who may have been assassinated by the CIA as well. While Diaz’s work made the oppressive Trujillo regime’s crimes against its people more personal, James’s novel puts the government’s misdeeds at a further remove – the authorities’ incompetence and selectively applied attention helped create these enclaves of wealth and poverty, and a lawless environment where local gangs would inevitably pour in to fill the void left by the absence of real government or the corruption of the local police. The infighting between the two main parties and the proxy war in the streets also created the opportunity for the most famous Jamaican in the world at the time, the Singer, to be simultaneously beloved by his people and marked for death by one faction vying for power. I’m at a disadvantage reading such novels, since I came into it with no knowledge of Jamaican postcolonial history and very little knowledge of the country’s culture, but reading James’ novel and then going online to read about events described in the book became a sort of superficial education on the subject.

Because James weaves multiple smaller plots around the central event of the assassination and its aftermath, there’s no single resolution to the novel, and many of the storylines fade out rather than reaching a clear conclusion. One particular death provides closure to other characters, while other events seem to end one phase of Jamaican political culture only to usher in a new one. It all adds to the feeling that James’ novel is the equivalent of a good Tarantino film – it’s hyper-realistic, over the top with violence, with a wide cast of characters, darkly funny at times but also tackling serious themes amidst the shock and gore. It’s not for everyone – one of the Booker committee members said it wasn’t a book you’d give to your mother to read – but it’s a great exemplar of why the Booker’s decision to open the prize up to writers from other countries was a good one.

Next up: Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield.

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→ December 27, 2018
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Zama.

Zama, available on amazon Prime, is the weirdest movie I’ve seen this year. Originally released in Argentina in 2017 and submitted by that country for this past year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it’s based on a 1956 novel and plays out like a Kafkaesque fever dream in colonial South America, where lives are cheap and promises worthless. It’s violent and full of confusion, to the point that it’s unclear whether any of what we’re seeing is real, or whether the main character himself is losing his mind. I haven’t read the novel, which wasn’t translated into English until 2016, but any sort of guidebook would have helped me navigate this weirdness, which had me befuddled from the opening scene and never did much to set me on track.

Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a local functionary in Spanish South America, in the town that is now Ascúncion, Paraguay, who has been waiting some time for a transfer order to reunite him with his wife and child. His title, corregidor, was unique to the Spanish colonial system and referred to the top official in a subdivision of the country’s massive holdings in the Americas, dating back to Castile in the Middle Ages, and they were typically quite powerful because they worked at such great distances from their superiors. Zama, however, always answers to a governor in this film, first one and then his replacement, and the transfer is forever delayed or even forgotten by the men with the power to put them into action. He continues to rule over petty matters of the locals but becomes increasingly erratic, at one point promising two Spanish landowners thirty Native Americans as slaves, and eventually gives up hope of a transfer and joins a vigilante party searching for the bandit Vicuña Porto, who was supposedly killed (twice, I think) earlier in the film but remains a threat to trade and travel between cities.

Zama starts the film as a sort of would-be lothario, obsessed with the lady Luciana (Lola Dueñas, who is made up and dressed to look utterly ridiculous), and acting as the protector of some young women in his household of unknown purpose. He becomes more disheveled as the film progresses, and the dialogue starts to break down and become increasingly disjointed, to the point where I wasn’t sure if I had missed bits of it or if the characters were simply speaking past each other. Zama brings up the letter multiple times in conversation at one point, only to have the governor seem to completely forget what he was talking about. There’s also a llama in the governor’s office at one point, never explained and never remarked upon by any characters, who seem to regard it as just another llama in the office (reminiscent of Elizabeth Moss’ roommate in The Square). I assume it was partly a play on Vicuña Porto’s name – a vicuña is a South American camel related to llamas – and thus an acknowledgement that he always exists under their noses and they’re unable or unwilling to defeat him.

Zama felt like an experimental novel brought to the screen but losing too much in translation. The gruesome finale feels absurd and metaphorical, but a scene like that requires a greater foundation to provide it with sufficient impact beyond mere revulsion. The extra descriptive text in that sort of book can make it comprehensible, but here I couldn’t get much further than understanding that Diego de Zama was a man trapped in a remote place in circumstances he couldn’t control, to the point that it may have caused him to lose his sanity. And that is a story I’ve seen before.

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→ December 26, 2018
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Amsterdam.

I’ve never met the novelist Ian McEwan, but after reading two of his books and seeing a film adaptation of a third, I think his worldview is depressingly misanthropic. Amsterdam, a slim novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 1998, plays out like a dark comedy without the comic elements, taking a mutual euthanasia pact between two friends and using it as a core plot device with the most obvious possible ending.

Clive and Vernon connect at the funeral of Molly Lane, a woman with whom they’d both previously had affairs and who has just died of some sort of progressive neurological disease, where they form this pact, saying if either sees the other heading for the same sort of miserable, undignified death, they’ll speed the process by going to Amsterdam where such things had just become legal. While at the funeral they also run into another of Molly’s former lovers, the ambitious politician Julian Garmony, then British Foreign Secretary with eyes on the top prize.

Vernon, an editor of a newspaper coping with falling readership, ends up privy to compromising photographs of Julian that could ruin the latter’s career, and after much debate within the office decides to publish them – over moral objections from Clive. Meanwhile, Clive, a renowned composer working on a piece for the government celebration of the upcoming millennium, is experiencing a bit of writer’s block and goes on a long walk in northwest England’s hilly Lake District, where he comes upon a man fighting with a woman, but chooses not to intervene because doing so might cost him the melody he’s crafting in his head. When he later explains this to Vernon, the latter is incensed at Clive’s selfishness and points out just how serious the consequences might have been. These two subplots turn the friends into mortal enemies, and, between that and the book’s title, you can probably see where we’re headed.

The Guardian‘s review at the time says the book has “a distinct whiff of Evelyn Waugh” in both style and subject, but I’d say that’s half right. Waugh’s social satires were often bitingly funny, both in character and in plot. If this reminds one of any of Waugh’s novels, it’s the questionably unfunny A Handful of Dust, where one major character ends up with one of the most unfortunate endings (short of death) in literary history. Amsterdam is devoid of humor; McEwan scorns his characters, and appears to loathe the Netherlands’ lax policy on euthanasia, but the combination of the two means two people we are supposed to hate drive each other to a shared ignominious end. Aside from my reaction that the conclusion probably wasn’t realistic, I was barely moved to shrug my shoulders. Even Tony Last got more of a rise out of me than that.

I didn’t care for Atonement, where McEwan builds a narrative around what I felt was a totally unrealistic event and then pulls the entire rug out from under readers; I did like this year’s film adaptation of On Chesil Beach, but the worldview within is still decidedly pessimistic, with both works arguing, in essence, that we can’t atone for or even recover from past mistakes. Maybe that’s true but it makes for miserable reading.

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→ December 26, 2018
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Blindspotting.

Blindspotting (amazon • iTunes) marks the writing debut for its co-stars, Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton) and Rafael Casal, who play the two lead characters, best friends in Oakland who end up confronting explicit and implicit racial bias over the course of three days in the city. It is spotty – no pun intended – okay, maybe a little bit intended – but also contains many strong scenes that point to the tremendous vision of the two writers that might just need a little more development time.

Diggs plays Collin, who has three days left on his yearlong probation for an assault that occurred while he was working as a bouncer at an area bar, and Casal plays his best friend Miles. Collin is black, Miles is white, and the two have been best friends since grade school. Miles ‘acts’ black, to the point where Collin refers to him with some affection by the n-word, but their relationship doesn’t reflect how the world as a whole views the two of them. Meanwhile, Collin is driving home from one of their jobs for a moving company one night when he sees a white police officer kill an unarmed black man who is fleeing and has his back turned when he’s shot. Because of the circumstances of his probation, he chooses not to come forward as a witness, which haunts him over the remainder of the film.

Blindspotting is about everyday racism, which means we get a greatest hits sort of look at the subject. Police brutality and BLM come up multiple times, in humorous and serious contexts. Guns and how people, including the police, view a white man with a gun and a black man with a gun differently also figure in the plot. The gentrification of Oakland, which has been becoming less black, is a regular topic within the dialogue, and drives a scene where Collin and Miles go to a party held by a white hipster tech executive that ends poorly when Miles loses his temper, as he’s wont to do.

There are plenty of well-drawn side characters here, including Collin’s ex-girlfriend Val (Janina Gavankar), whose ethnicity is left unstated in a film where racial identity is paramount; and Miles’ African-American wife Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones, also of Hamilton), but the two men are the heart of the film. Both are complex, but Collin is better developed, and the script maintains the audience’s connection to him by gradually revealing the depth of the character over the course of the film, reserving the story of why he went to jail until somewhere around the midpoint, a flashback that really changes the perception of his character.

The climactic scene in Blindspotting is both absurd and its best, tightest sequence, requiring a fair-sized coincidence and a touch of reality suspension … but this is Diggs’ screaming guitar solo here, and he absolutely nails it. Although this is fiction, it reminded me of the monologue Hannah Gadsby delivers at the end of her comedy special Nanette, where she has lulled the audience into acquiescence with some blisteringly funny jokes, only to turn very serious on her captive audience and give a speech on equality and identity that could crumble mountains. Diggs’ performance in this last scene enters that same zone of unreality – we were here, now you’ve just moved us somewhere else, but we were already in the moment enough that we’ll just come along for the ride. There’s a level of trust required to pull off that kind of trick. Gadsby completely earns that trust. Diggs gets most of the way there, and has to resort to a gimmick to keep viewers in that moment long enough to complete the scene.

Blindspotting‘s humor isn’t as consistent as it tries to be – the best gag in the film is a sight gag around Collin’s hair – with a lot of cringeworthy jokes that don’t land and feel out of place in a film that’s trying to deal with some huge subjects. Miles handles the bulk of the successful comic relief, and Casal’s fast-talking act is riveting to watch. His negotiations with a potential buyer over a sailboat are Marx Brothers-level comedy and among the funniest moments in the film. That lightens the mood for a while, but the humor eventually fades out or just stops working (the scenes at the hipster party, with the utterly clueless white host, are really painful) while the serious nature of the film takes precedence. It’s not a top ten film of the year for me, but it’s a very good one, and I think a very promising writing debut for Diggs and Casal.

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→ December 24, 2018
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is technically a movie – it was released to theaters, and is also on Netflix as a single, 135-minute … well, movie. But it’s also kind of not a movie: it’s an anthology of six stories that have nothing in common beyond their settings, the American West of the frontier period, and the fact that Joel and Ethan Coen wrote and directed all of them. As you might find with any short story anthology, this sextet has highs and lows; the longest story here is the least interesting and perhaps worst acted, while there are also some truly brilliant moments comparable to the best work the Coens have done.

The first story bears the title of the whole film, and it’s short, silly, and establishes the theme that runs throughout the entire anthology – fate does not care for your narratives. You may take this as meaning the universe is random, or simply that man proposes, God disposes, but regardless, the Coens revel here in setting up one story only to take a right turn at the conclusion. Buster Scruggs is a sharp-shooting, fast-talking outlaw, prone to hifalutin vocabulary and expressing himself through song, a bad guy who enjoys killing worse guys and then singing over their corpses. He’s utterly ridiculous except that he’s good enough to shoot off a man’s trigger finger at a significant distance, until, of course, he meets someone a bit quicker.

The six films are all pretty dark, even when they’re very funny, and only one has anything you might consider a ‘happy’ ending. Tom Waits appears in the fourth story as a lonely goldpanner who spends days digging in a bucolic riverside spot to find the vein he believes is there, only to learn he’s been followed by a jumper with a pistol. What follows turns the narrative on its head and then flips it back again, although all of the story takes a back seat to the gorgeous scenery, which reminded me of the incredible landscape shots from the Coens’ remake of True Grit.

The worst of the six, by far, is set on the Oregon Trail, where Zoe Kazan plays a young woman traveling with her mansplaining brother to Oregon, where he’ll start a business and she’s due to be married to his business partner. He dies rather early in the trip, which is no great loss to the viewer, leaving the story to focus on the travails of a young woman left on her own on the caravan with no one to help her but a hired boy she may not be able to pay. The plot itself fits the broader themes of the anthology, but Kazan looks and especially sounds completely out of place here. I thought she was the weak link in The Big Sick, and I think she’s even more of a problem here, only adding value because she’s little and that helps emphasize the helpless nature of her character.

That leads into the concluding story, a gothic horror story set on a stagecoach at night, the one part of the film that feels like a play and by far the portion of this anthology that boasts the best cast, including Tyne Daly and Brendan Gleeson as two of five travelers on the coach. As they talk and argue, telling bits of their life stories, it becomes less clear that the passengers understand where they are going – and, to the Coens’ great credit, it isn’t clear at the end of the story, either.

Aside from the uneven nature of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which is inevitable for any set of six mini-films, the anthology suffers from how few real female characters it has in the film. Four of the stories have none; the last two have one each, Kazan’s and Daly’s, and the latter, while probably my favorite performance in the entire movie, shares screen time with four other actors all kind of having the times of their lives. (There’s a little surprise for Major League fans in this segment, but I won’t ruin it.) I could understand an argument that a movie set in the Old West would likely have few women in an authentic plot, but six different stories, only one revolves around a woman, and she’s not very strong at all. In a year where most of the best films had women at or near the hearts of their plots, the lack thereof in this film stands out as a real weakness.

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