→ May 7, 2021
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Minari.

Minari was the last film we caught before the Oscars, completing our run through the eight Best Picture nominees (and all of the Director and Acting nominees, except for Hillbilly Elegy). Nominated for six films, with Youn Yuh-jung winning Best Supporting Actress, it is a lovely, funny slice of nostalgia base don writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood, and gives a different take on the immigrant experience in America.

Steven Yeun stars as Jacob Yi, who moves with his wife Monica (Han Ye-Ri, formerly of Hello My Twenties!), daughter Anne, and son David (Alan Kim), the last of whom is Chung’s stand-in in the film. Jacob has brought his family to rural Arkansas, where he intends to build a farm and grow traditional Korean produce he can sell to restaurants and the growing immigrant communities of the American South. He and Monica will work as chicken sexers to earn enough money to get the farm started, but Monica isn’t on board with the whole farming plan, and the whole family has trouble assimilating until Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Youn) arrives to help Monica take care of the kids and provide substantial comic relief.

What happens from there is almost beside the point, although there is certainly drama to come, and the family will be forced to confront the cracks threatening to tear them apart, to choose how they’ll respond when everything is on the verge of falling apart. This is far more a study of its characters, of Jacob and David specifically, and of its time and place – Arkansas in the 1980s, in an overwhelmingly white community that by and large welcomes the Yi family, even if sometimes they don’t exactly go about things in the best ways. Chung’s script is full of heart, and empathy for its characters – there really are no antagonists here other than the vagaries of nature and fate.

Chung tells the story mostly through David’s eyes, although there are a few scenes with his parents by themselves, and the growth of the relationship between David and the grandmother he doesn’t know becomes one of the emotional touchstones in Minari. The movie takes its name from a resilient, edible dropwort, also known as Korean watercress or Chinese celery, that David’s grandmother plants on the banks of a stream near the family’s farm; in addition to the metaphor of the vegetable itself, water, or the lack thereof, is one of the recurring symbols of Minari, showing up right at the start when Jacob encounters a charlatan with a divining rod but refuses to pay him for his “service.” Soon-ja is unflappable, even as David rejects her at first, and her often coarse humor is one of the film’s best facets, and a surprising contrast to her dour, reticent daughter’s exterior affect.

Minari‘s magic is in how Chung manages to take something so small and make it feel so broad and universal; nearly everything in this movie is about the Yi family and what happens within their household, right up until the one big dramatic twist at the end – and even that event functions as another way to explore and demonstrate the way the family holds together. The story is sweet, sometimes bittersweet, but not saccharine, and full of heart. It’s frequently funny, between Soon-ja’s witticisms and the extremely eccentric farmhand Paul (Will Patton), and its tragedies feel real, not forced.

Youn’s win for Best Supporting Actress was well-deserved, and there seemed to be no real pushback before or after her victory. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (for Yeun, who deserved the same honor for Burning but was snubbed), and Best Original Score. I loved Minari, but wouldn’t have voted for it in any of the other categories, just because it was up against two movies – Nomadland and The Father – I liked a bit more. It did, however, make my top 5 among 2020-eligible movies; I’ve seen everything from that cycle I intended to see except for First Cow and a couple of international films. So here’s my almost-final rankings for 2020:

1. Nomadland

2. The Father

3. A Sun

4. Minari

5. Promising Young Woman

6. Wolfwalkers

7. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

8. Judas and the Black Messiah

9. A Personal History of David Copperfield

10. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

11. Collective

12. The Nest

13. Boys State

14. Palm Springs

15. One Night in Miami

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→ March 23, 2021
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Another Round.

Among the Big Six categories at the Oscars, the biggest surprise nomination was, I think, the Best Director nod for Thomas Vinterberg, director and writer of the Danish-language movie Another Round (Druk), which also scored one of the five nominations for Best International Feature Film. The latter is understandable, especially given how universal (if very man-centric) its themes are, but the former … well, I have a feeling it might not entirely be because of Vinterberg’s work on the film, which is streaming on Hulu and can be rented on amazon.

Another Round follows four male, middle-aged high school teachers who are bored with their lives and decide to try to maintain a constant level of intoxication, starting at a .05 BAC, throughout the workday, only stopping at 8 pm. The immediate results are positive – they’re happier, they lighten up, they connect more with their students, and in the case of Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), his marriage seems to improve – but the effects are temporary, and as they decide to push their luck and crank up the BAC, the wheels start to come off for all four of them, forcing them to reconsider their plans and their purpose in this experiment in the first place.

For a movie that touches on some deep material like getting to middle age, thinking your best years might be behind you, wondering if some of your major life choices (at work, in marriage) have been mistakes, Another Round is often delightfully silly. All four lead actors do a pretty good drunk impression, reminiscent of Parks & Recreation‘s Snake Juice episode, and watching these somewhat awkward 40- to 55-year-old men (Mikkelsen is 55, and I don’t think Martin is supposed to be any older than that) dance and stumble about, or even just smile the smile of a mildly inebriated man can be charming – especially since their bad behavior mostly comes at their own expense. The script offers some balance, as one of the men struggles to control his drinking once they start ramping up their BACs, but the general tone is one of seizing life and enjoying the moment – and if a little alcohol helps you get there, what’s the harm?

Martin’s reactions especially seem to reflect those of someone dealing with depression who finally gets some form of treatment, whether CBT or medication, and starts to wake up to the life around him. Danish binge-drinking culture (the film’s Danish title literally means “binge drinking”) is strong enough that the story here probably isn’t metaphorical, but if some viewers’ takeaway is to do something about their midlife malaises, Vinterberg would probably consider that a success. On the other hand, this is a very narrow look at life, very much that of men whose biggest problem in life is ennui. Women are tangential to the story, and the two men of the four who have children aren’t exactly carrying much of the child-rearing load here, while they seem to have job security, without any worries about money or health. That doesn’t detract from the film’s entertainment value, but there’s something very frivolous about the whole exercise that doesn’t compare well to the other leading films from 2020.

Another Round swept the four main awards for which it was nominated at the European Film Awards, winning for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Mikkelsen), and Screenwriter, after winning the same four honors at the Robert-Prisen, the Danish equivalent to the Oscars. That leads to the big surprise in the Academy Award nominations, and the truly tragic story behind Another Round. Vinterberg wrote this story in part with inspiration from his 19-year-old daughter’s stories of the drinking culture of Danish teenagers, but four days after filming began, she was killed in a car accident in Belgium, hit by a truck driver who was looking at his phone and didn’t see that her car had stopped. Filming did resume and Vinterberg dedicated it to her memory. Much of the English-language coverage of the movie has included her death and its effect on both Vinterberg and the film (he altered the script to make it more life-affirming), and I wonder if that drove support for him in this category. There isn’t a great argument on the merits for his nomination over Regina King for One Night in Miami or even Armando Iannucci for the overlooked The Personal History of David Copperfield. This just isn’t that kind of film – it’s good, entertaining, ridiculous in a good way, but I don’t think the direction or script really rise to the level of what I’d expect for a Best Director nominee.

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→ March 21, 2021
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Promising Young Woman.

I still can’t believe Camilla Parker-Bowles is now a two-time Oscar nominee, but she absolutely deserves it.

Emerald Fennell, previously best known for portraying Prince Charles’ affair partner on seasons 3 and 4 of The Crown, now has nominations to her credit for writing the screenplay for and directing Promising Young Woman, a brilliant, shocking, and powerful revenge story that feels incredibly well-timed. Featuring a tremendous lead performance from Carey Mulligan, the film earned five nominations – two for Fennell, one for Mulligan, one for Editing, and, perhaps the big surprise of the five, one for Best Picture. (It’s available to rent on amazon and other streaming services.)

Mulligan plays Cassie, who, as the film opens, is in a bar, alone, and so drunk she can barely sit up straight. A guy in the bar offers to help her get home, but then takes her to his place, where he tries to sexually assault her, at which point Mulligan looks right up at the camera to reveal that she’s stone sober – and she confronts the creep before leaving. This is a regular weekend act for her, and we learn that she dropped out of medical school when her classmate, Nina Fisher, was raped by a classmate at a party, and the school did nothing about it. She’s working in a hipster coffee shop when another classmate, Ryan (Bo Burnham), walks in, and the two start gradually start to have a meet-cute – just at the same time that Cassie gets wind that Nina’s rapist is about to get married, at which point she launches a more elaborate plan to take revenge on everyone involved in the rape and abortive investigation.

Fennell leaves all kinds of clues in the film to indicate that Cassie’s calm exterior demeanor hides the fact that she’s not quite right. Over the course of the story, we learn how Cassie’s life seems to have just stopped after the assault and immediate aftermath. She lives with her parents, who say she has no friends and hasn’t had a boyfriend in years. She’s still wearing a childlike pattern of pastel colors on her nails. Her wardrobe, which seems rather extensive, often veers towards clothing maybe ten years too young for her. She’s supposed to be 30, but alternates between looking 25 and 40 throughout the film. She’s our heroine, and there’s a distinct pleasure in watching her dish it out to various awful men across the film, but there’s also something amiss here, from how and why she left medical school on to just how deranged her plans for the rapist and his enablers are, and Fennell does a spectacular job of balancing those elements so that the conclusion can still work.

The ending is shocking and the subject of many thinkpieces already – this Variety piece has spoilers and does an excellent job breaking it down, and the video with Fennell and Mulligan is well worth the time – and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we watched the movie. Listening to Fennell in that video, in addition to getting a window on to her brilliance as a writer, changed how I interpreted the ending, and that in turn changed some of my thoughts on what came before. Cassie’s life just stopped after Nina was assaulted and everyone – the school administrators, most of their classmates, even one of Nina and Cassie’s best friends – chose to look the other way, and as the film progresses it becomes clearer that the revenge fantasy is at least mixed with the story of Cassie’s unraveling, a satirical condemnation of a system stacked against victims but also a tragedy of a woman whose promise – who was, at least, on her way to living the life her parents wanted for her – is gone. The fact that Cassie would take the risks she ultimately takes without any regard for the effect her injury or death might have on her parents, for example, is a mostly unspoken indicator that Fennell didn’t write Cassie as a flawless heroine.

I’ve seen four of the five Best Actress nominees so far, and Mulligan would be my pick for the award, although the one I haven’t seen is Andra Day, who won the Golden Globe in this category, and the other three nominees are all outstanding – this might be the most loaded category of the season. I’ve also seen four of the five Best Original Screenplay nominees (I’m waiting on Minari), and would choose this over Sound of Metal, Judas and the Black Messiah, or the extra-Sorkiny The Trial of the Chicago 7. I wouldn’t put it over Nomadland for Best Picture, but it might be my #2, with Minari and The Father still on my list to see. I’ll be pulling for this to take home those two honors, though, as it’s tremendous even when there are minor plot points I wish had unfurled differently.

(My wife and I discuss every movie we watch at length, so her opinions always appear somewhere in these reviews, but here she deserves particular credit for shaping my interpretation of this film. As a man, there are issues here I’ve just never had to face in the world, and her perspective was invaluable.)

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→ March 18, 2021
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Mank.

Mank led all films with ten Oscar nominations this year, and after seeing the film (which is on Netflix), my reaction is best summed up by the GIF of Ryan Reynolds saying, “but why?” I think the answer is actually obvious – it’s a talky black-and-white movie about Hollywood, all things the voters find hard to resist – but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept this adequate if somewhat boring movie taking home spots that could have gone to many more deserving films.

Mank is Herman Mankiewicz, a cantankerous screenwriter who was often called in to ‘fix’ scripts by other writers from the 1920s through the 1940s, and who worked with Orson Welles on the script for Citizen Kane, which won them both the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The film tells the story of the writing of that script, with flashbacks explaining how Mank managed to become persona non grata in much of Hollywood, and his relationship with actress Marion Davies and partnership with her nephew Charles Lederer.

I really enjoy some of Orson Welles’ work, and appreciate Citizen Kane for its artistic merit and historical importance, and I can certainly get into some making-of stories, but I can’t express how little I cared about what was happening on the screen in Mank. It’s the story of a self-destructive white man handed one gift after another only to throw them away via drink, gambling, or just general assholery. It’s also told through a poorly-structured series of flashbacks that bounce around in time so often it makes it too hard to follow when things are happening, especially since Gary Oldman is 20 years older than Mankiewicz was in 1940, when the latter wrote Citizen Kane, and thus nearly 30 years older than Mankiewicz is supposed to be in flashbacks, with no real concession made to the age gap.

Oldman is busy chewing scenery when he isn’t throwing it back up, and it’s especially frustrating because it seems like he took the message the Academy gave him when they named him Best Actor for a lengthy Winston Churchill impression in Darkest Hour as a sign to go even further in this direction, forgetting the actor he showed he could be in Léon, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or even Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where he used his scene-chewing ability to far better purpose. Amanda Seyfried earned her first Oscar nomination for her work here as Davies in a role that doesn’t have a lot of screen time and is probably most notable for her accent here; I’m not sure she does much more than Lily Collins does as Mank’s amanuensis Rita, and really none of the women here are that well-written in the first place. The most compelling supporting performance might be Tom Burke’s as Welles; Burke absolutely nails Welles’ voice in a way I found thoroughly distracting (in a good way), although he loses it a little in a critical scene late in the film where he and Mankiewicz feud and break over the final edits and what credit Mank might receive.

Mank is just so self-indulgent and so insular that I couldn’t help but think back to The Artist, which won Best Picture a decade ago for being a black-and-white movie that told everyone how great movies are, as well as for its central gimmick as a mostly-silent film. They’re movies that appeal not just to the presumed interests of Academy voters, but to their identities: Both give movies an importance beyond reality, and, unfortunately, both rely on the assumption that viewers will care far more about inside-baseball stories about how movies are made than they actually do. The best movies about making movies are great movies first that happen to have elements of moviemaking within their stories – Singin’ in the Rain, ostensibly a story about the first talkies, is far more a tale of fakery and integrity, along with a slapdash romance and some great dance numbers; Boogie Nights, a movie about the golden age of porn, is really about this group of misfits and outcasts who form (and break) familial bonds while working in an industry that embraces them for their weirdness. Mank is a movie about a white guy who got more chances than he deserved and drank them all away. It made me want to pour myself a tall one more than it made me want to go watch Citizen Kane or any of the classic films of that era.

As for those nominations, David Fincher getting a Best Director nod over Regina King for One Night in Miami is just … it’s exhausting. And that latter film missing out on Best Picture with two slots still unfilled and Mank getting one of the eight nominations is baffling. I’d have given Gary Oldman’s spot in Best Actor to Dev Patel for David Copperfield, and I think it’s telling that Mank‘s screenwriter, Fincher’s father Jack, didn’t get a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, especially with the intricate flashback sequences making this story harder to follow. Fincher’s done some great work, and this project had to be more personal to him than anything he’s done before, but if this film had received a theatrical release, I bet it would have tanked, and perhaps taken some of its Oscar helium with it.

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→ February 22, 2021
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Nomadland.

Nomadland has been the front-runner for Best Picture for several months now, taking home the Golden Lion at Venice, winning Best Film or Best Picture from multiple cities’ film critics associations (Boston, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Houston, DC, Dallas, Seattle, and London), and landing four nominations at the upcoming Golden Globes. It’s a very different sort of film than anything I’ve seen, layering a traditional, fictional narrative on top of a work of cinema verité, based on an acclaimed non-fiction book but with Frances McDormand delivering what might be her third Oscar-winning performance. The movie is now streaming exclusively on Hulu.

Nomadland is about vandwellers, people who have chosen, or been forced to choose, to live itinerant lives in their vans or RVs, traveling around the country and taking on seasonal or other short-term work, but avoiding the fixed lifestyle and long-term obligations of home ownership. The book, by Jessica Bruder, was non-fiction, and explored this subculture of outcasts, misfits, and nonconformists, and the movie brings in many of the same people who appeared in Bruder’s book as the backdrop for the fictional story of Fern (McDormand), who is forced into this life when her job and the company town where she lived all go away in the span of a few months in 2011. (She’s not a real character, but the town, Empire, Nevada, became a ghost town, and the factory shown in the movie is still shuttered, although the gypsum mine has since re-opened and there are about two dozen people living in Empire.)

Fran is widowed and has nothing to tether her to Empire, including, it would appear, no real ties to friends nearby, so she buys a van, refits it for nomad life, and hits the road, starting out by working at an Amazon warehouse for her first seasonal job, then connecting with a group of nomads who teach her a little about the lifestyle and offer some tips. Many of these wanderers are real vandwellers from the book – Swankie, Linda, and the evangelist of the vandwelling lifestyle, Bob Wells, whose history of failing to pay child support is not mentioned in the story. One who isn’t is David, played by David Strathairn, whose voice would give him away even if you didn’t recognize him through his unkempt hair and white beard. He’s smitten with Fern, and the two run into each other multiple times, with David trying to convince Fern to come along with him and, eventually, to join him when he decides to give up van life and settle down with his son’s family.

Director Chloe Zhao’s previous feature, The Rider, also used non-actors in most of its roles, with its protagonist playing himself, so she’s mining some familiar ground here, but it is hard to imagine this movie without McDormand in it. She is utterly essential to this film, not her story specifically but the way she inhabits this niche in our world and makes it entirely plausible that she is, in fact, Fern, a woman abandoned by fortune who is trying to avoid going over the cliff. Her portrayal of an anguished, grieving person looks so effortless and so delicate that it reminds me of when extremely athletic players (often players of color) are accused of showing too little effort when the truth is that they’re just that talented.

Zhao also films this in a way that empathizes with the vandwellers without patronizing or mocking them. This could easily be misery porn, or a screed about our broken economic system (especially around health care), or a sort of weird cautionary tale about how people end up living out of their cars. Instead, Zhao presents this world without judgment, giving us the people in it as they are, so that their humanity is at the heart of the film, not their choices, and not their misfortune.

Nomadland is also frequently gorgeous as Zhao gives us soaring landscapes across the American West and some close shots of forests or other natural vistas, including the view from what I presume was supposed to be Fern’s old house, now abandoned but still intact. The film doesn’t romanticize the vandwelling life, but there’s a certain romance in the idea of getting in a van or an RV and just driving across these great unpopulated swaths of land, without so much as a destination in mind, although I find it hard to fathom doing that alone – and that’s without the added concerns that a woman would have making the same sort of journeys by herself.

Right now, Nomadland is my #1 movie from 2020, and my wife’s as well. I’ll go out on the shortest of limbs to say it’s going to take at least four nominations at the Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography – and I can at least see why it’s the favorite to win the first one, because it’s a great movie and, in a roundabout way, speaks to the economic uncertainty of modern American life. It also gives Zhao an excellent chance to become the second woman and the first woman of color to win Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow won in 2010 for The Hurt Locker). We should see two women nominated in that category in the same year, with at least one of Regina King (One Night in Miami) and Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) joining Zhao, which would be a first, although knowing the Academy’s history I wouldn’t be shocked to see them screw this up too and give one nod to, say, Aaron Sorkin instead.

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