→ March 5, 2021
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Wolfwalkers.

Wolfwalkers is the latest film from the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, the 2-D specialists who have received Academy Award nominations for all three of their previous full-length films, Song of the Sea, The Secret of Kells, and The Breadwinner. Based on an original story by Will Collins, writer of Song of the Sea, this film – available only on Apple TV+ right now – is Cartoon Saloon’s best yet, with its most cohesive story and stunning hand-drawn animation, enough that it should win the studio their first Oscar, even though that won’t likely come to pass.

The story takes place in the 1600s in Kilkenny, a town in southern Ireland, where Robyn and her father Bill Goodfellowe have just arrived. The town is threatened by wolves in the nearby forest, which the town’s Lord Protector wishes to clear-cut, which would kill off the wolves or force them to move to another stand. Bill is a soldier, and wants Robyn to stay at home, for her own protection and other reasons that will become apparent, while Robyn is every young person in every animated movie ever – she wants to go out, explore, be a warrior, and so on. She gets into trouble multiple times, and ends up in the forest herself, where she discovers a Wolfwalker, a young girl named Mebh who can project herself into a corporeal wolf, leaving her human body in repose. The two become friends, and Robyn realizes that her father and her town will destroy Mebh’s entire pack – and kill Mebh’s mother, who left in her wolf form some weeks before and has yet to return.

The themes here are pretty straightforward – mankind’s inability to find balance with nature or respect other sentient species, and the dangerous combination of superstition and ignorance – and the Lord Protector character is fairly one-note, although he’s less overtly evil than the typical villain in animated fare. The relationship between the two girls is the real heart of the story, and the best sequences are when the two are together in human or wolf form, from their initial bickering to a very real argument that starts because Robyn tries to protect Mebh without respecting the latter’s agency. The relationship between Robyn and her father could have been more fleshed out early in the film, although it’s authentic enough as it is.

What sets Wolfwalkers apart from other animated films, and even Cartoon Saloon’s prior work, is the animation style. Cartoon Saloon’s animated people have a certain look to them, which is no different here, but the world around the characters explodes off the screen in color and texture – and that includes Mebh’s hair, which you’ve seen if you’ve seen any promotional materials for the film. The Breadwinner‘s setting required a grim color palette and harsh backgrounds, but Wolfwalkers is set on the Emerald Isle and the animators make sure you never forget it. It’s a visual feast, and even the occasional shot within the town walls, where colors are muted and you can almost feel the dust and soot in the air, can still be a marvel of layering and imagination.

You can guess most of the story’s ending by its midpoint, although the way our heroines defeat the Lord Protector has at least one surprise in it, so the development of Robyn’s character, and her relationship with Mebh, end up carrying the weight in the plot. It’s fortunate that the script is up to that task, and the two young women who voice those lead characters, Honor Kneafsey and Eva Whittaker respectively, are so good, with an on-screen relationship reminiscent of the one the Fanning sisters showed in My Neighbor Totoro. There’s a little violence here that would make this inappropriate for the youngest viewers, but less than you’d find in a typical super-hero movie (including Into the Spider-Verse). I haven’t seen all of the possible nominees yet, but I’m high enough on Wolfwalkers to say it’s going to be the best animated film of 2020.

Wolfwalkers was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film, but lost out to Pixar’s Soul, which seems likely to recur at the Oscars, where Onward (meh) and Over the Moon will probably get two of the other three nominations but have no chance to win. I don’t think there’s any comparison here; Soul is the more technically impressive film, and funnier, but has a far less interesting story, worse character development, and isn’t as visually appealing.It’s just very hard for other studios to beat Pixar/Disney; those studios have taken 13 of the 19 Oscars in this category, and 7 of the last 8. They often deserve the wins, but have also won several for no apparent reason other than commercial popularity – Frozen over both The Wind Rises and Ernest & Celestine comes to mind, as does Brave over, well, anything decent – so the odds seem to be stacked against any competing studio. Wolfwalkers is clearly the better film, however, and if you are one of the 18 people in the United States who has Apple TV+, add this to your queue.

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→ March 4, 2021
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Pieces of a Woman.

Vanessa Kirby stole so many scenes in the first two seasons of The Crown, often overshadowing her co-star Claire Foy, who played the actual Queen of England. As the tragic (and later tragicomic) figure Princess Margaret, she was by turns charming, fashionable, jealous, and, as in Margaret’s real life, heartbroken and betrayed. I’d seen her previously in the short-lived BBC series The Hour, but didn’t recognize her when I saw her in 2020’s Mr. Jones or when she took on the role of Margaret.

Pieces of a Woman represents her critical breakthrough, as her command performance as a woman grieving the loss of a baby during a home birth gone awry earned her the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, a Golden Globe nomination for the same, and, most likely, an Oscar nomination as well. The movie is uneven, and the resolution of the story feels more like fantasy than reality on multiple levels, but Kirby is a knockout in this role and makes this arduous film well worth the time investment.

Kirby plays Martha, a very pregnant woman whose husband, Sean (Shia LaBoeuf), is a blue-collar worker and clearly not respected by her mother (Ellen Burstyn). Martha and Sean have chosen a home birth, but their midwife isn’t available when labor begins, so they call another midwife their original one recommended. The new midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), seems a little overmatched when things start to go wrong, and after it seems like they’re out of the woods and their baby girl is born, she starts to turn blue and stops breathing. Martha and Sean are both left to grieve their loss, but both Sean and Martha’s mother become invested in the criminal case against Eva, pulling them away from Martha when she needs them, and the family dynamics become even more complicated when Martha’s cousin Suzanne (Sarah Snook) is the prosecuting attorney.

The film opens with its best scene, a 24-minute single-shot depiction of the labor, delivery, and death of the baby that is intense not just because you know how it’s going to end, but because it’s so slow relative to most films. This is a more detailed depiction of childbirth than you get in most films, and it’s only to the movie’s benefit, especially because it shows the physical labor (no pun intended) required of the mother and thus further underlines both the level of Martha’s anguish and the emotional distance she feels from everyone around her, including her husband, when their baby dies.

Kirby is just powerful in this role, even in grief; there’s no lower gear anywhere in the performance, regardless of the mood or situation. She’s especially good in scenes with her mother – and Burstyn, who seems unlikely to get an Oscar nod, is also excellent – who seems completely unable to understand her daughter in multiple conversations. She’s also good in scenes with LaBoeuf, who is … fine. He’s received praise for his performance, or at least did before FKA Twigs accused him of emotional and physical abuse; I couldn’t stand him in American Honey, either, and I just couldn’t find him credible here, but I concede that it’s difficult to separate the actor from the character in this case. At least here, we rarely see him without Kirby, who is very much the emotional center of the movie.

The ending, however, doesn’t live up to the previous 90-plus minutes. We end up in a courtroom, where the case is resolved with something out of Law & Order – well-acted, but, still, unrealistic and maudlin – that is an ostensible attempt to show the end of Martha’s emotional arc. I don’t buy it, because it’s not something we would see in the real world, and because Martha’s arc would have no real conclusion. My lay understanding of the psychology of grief is that it doesn’t go away; it may fade, or just be blunted by time, but it persists. That point leads me to wonder if the final scene is meant to be real, fantasy, or just ambiguous, which is something I’ll leave you to answer in the comments if you’re so inclined.

There’s more than enough in Pieces of a Woman to recommend it, even with the flawed ending and my personal distaste for LaBoeuf. The opening scene is masterful, and I imagine people will refer to it for years the way they did The Player‘s opening scene. Burstyn will probably miss out on what would be her seventh Oscar nomination, especially with Jodie Foster winning a Golden Globe for The Mauritanian, but she’s superb in a pivotal role, a better foil for Kirby in character and in ability. And, if nothing else has convinced you, watch it for Kirby, who may not win in a stacked Best Actress category, but did deliver one of the best performances of 2020.

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→ March 2, 2021
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Judas and the Black Messiah.

Daniel Kaluuya’s Golden Globes win might bring some more attention to the superb Judas and the Black Messiah, available now on HBO Max, a biopic that focuses on the final months of Fred Hampton’s life by focusing equally on the man who betrayed him. It’s a different angle than a more typical biography, and I can see an argument that it gives Hampton short shrift, but the two lead performances absolutely drive this movie.

Fred Hampton (Kaluuya) was the head of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party when Edgar Hoover’s FBI decided he was a threat to the nation and, with the help of the members of the Chicago Police Department who weren’t busy assaulting protesters, executed him in his bed while his pregnant girlfriend listened from the next room. The FBI was able to do this because one of Hampton’s lieutenants, William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), was an FBI informant who ratted out Hampton to avoid a felony charge of car theft. O’Neal not only provided information to his FBI handler, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), but slipped a sedative into Hampton’s drink the night of the execution so he’d be unable to flee or fight back.

Judas and the Black Messiah follows O’Neal’s story from his arrest to Hampton’s murder, bookending the film with footage from Eyes on the Prize II, in which O’Neal gave his only public comment on his involvement in Hampton’s assassination. The narrative focus shifts away from O’Neal to Hampton as needed, giving more time for Hampton’s character to develop, and more time for Kaluuya to show how a magnetic speaker like Hampton could develop such a strong following in such a short period of time – he first became active in social justice movements at 18, and the FBI had him executed when he was 21. (Kaluuya and Stanfield are both much older than the men they portray.)

Stanfield is the lead actor here, at least by how the film’s producers have submitted the pair’s names for awards, but most of the film’s strongest moments belong to Kaluuya. It’s unsurprising, given his superb performances in Get Out and Widows, but he is an unbelievably compelling Hampton whenever he’s speaking to any sort of crowd, friendly or hostile. Kaluuya was positively creepy in Widows as a remorseless, vindictive killer, and here he channels that same implacable calm in any situation, such as when Hampton speaks to a group of Appalachian whites, transplants in Chicago, who rallied under the Confederate flag but also shared some progressive views with the Panthers (a meeting, and subsequent alliance, that occurred in real life).

Meanwhile, despite a strong performance by Stanfield, the script doesn’t give us enough insight into why O’Neal was willing to betray Hampton, to work with the FBI and against his own community, even when he gets clear evidence that the Panthers were creating positive change. His initial willingness to sign up as an informant, avoiding what the film says would have been six years in prison, is easy to grasp, but as the demands on him grow, and he’s more entrenched within the Panther organization, why wouldn’t he balk? Where’s the hesitation beyond what the script gives us in a phone call or two where he threatens to walk away and then changes his mind when reminded of the charges hanging over his head. Stanfield is very good at portraying anguish, speaking through clenched jaws with his head slightly bowed, but there’s something lacking in the character’s portrayal here – although even the actual interview O’Neal gave shortly before his death (the same day that Eyes on the Prize II aired) fails to provide a satisfactory explanation, as he seems unwilling to confront the consequences of his own actions. It’s at least plausible that director Shaka King and writers Keith and Kenneth Lucas made an active choice to leave O’Neal’s character vague because of the paucity of information on his motivations and feelings after the fact.

Between this film and the contemporaneous The Trial of the Chicago 7, it’s a strong year for ACAB in movies (or perhaps ACCAB, since both films involve gross misconduct by Chicago police), which speaks to much of the present mood in large portions of the country even though both events took place over 50 years ago. The idea of our own government executing a 21-year-old citizen in his sleep, where the police fired 90 shots and the Panthers in the apartment fired just one, should still shock and horrify us, and Judas and the Black Messiah doesn’t shy away from the corruption and police-state authoritarianism that allowed these events to take place – and the men behind them to walk away unscathed. It’s infuriating without feeling manipulative, unlike Sorkin’s film, because Judas’ script hews far more closely to the true story. It’s a film-world crime that The Trial of the Chicago 7 got a Best Picture – Drama nomination at the Globes, and a screenplay win, when Judas received neither, something I hope is remedied when the Oscars come out with their own slate of nominees in two weeks, with Kaluuya also deserving of a nod. Judas is an imperfect film in a few ways – I could have done without some of the inside-the-FBI stuff too – but between Kaluuya’s performance and the sheer power of the story behind it, it’s one of the year’s best.

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→ February 26, 2021
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The Nest.

Writer-director Sean Durkin’s first feature film, 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, was a marvelous, gripping story with a star turn from a then-unknown Elizabeth Olsen – or, if she was known, it was for being a younger sister – that seemed to herald great things for Durkin once he had more resources available for another project. He finally returned to the screen in 2020 with The Nest, another extremely taut, well-acted, psychological thriller, returning again to themes of emotional manipulation and broken people, this time in a nuclear family where the couple are frantically trying to ignore the cracks in their marriage’s foundation.

Set in the 1980s, which is evident from the music to the clothes to the hairstyles, The Nest follows Roy (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) as they relocate from New York City to the English countryside, where Roy believes he’ll find new business opportunities with a previous employer. They move into a giant Victorian house in Surrey that’s far too big for them and their two children, but it becomes evident that it is another symptom of Roy’s penchant for magical thinking and aspiration. The move isn’t for new opportunities, but because he’s broke, as Allison learns when construction on the stables for her horse-training business comes to an abrupt halt, and the lucrative deal he thinks he’s going to strike with his old firm turns out to be another pipe dream. The illusory world Roy has built around himself begins to crumble, while Allison tires of pretending everything is fine and becomes increasingly contemptuous of him, while her teenaged daughter, adrift and also recognizing an opportunity as teenagers do, rebels against them and the changes they’ve forced upon her.

The Nest is a movie of privilege, not about its exercise, but about its mere existence. Roy and Allison worry about things like status and appearances because they can – somehow, even with his chicanery and extravagance, they still have enough money to support themselves, and send the kids to private school, and, in Allison’s case, to keep a cash box hidden in the house because she knows full well that Roy is unreliable when it comes to money. The wounds here are self-inflicted, and we do get some brief glimpses of why as we learn a little of Roy’s and Allison’s histories, so this film is concerned with the suffering we create for ourselves rather than that the world imposes on us – more so if we are poor, or nonwhite, or just outside the circles in which these two people travel.

Coon is a treasure, as always – she was the best part of the one season of The Leftovers I watched – and she gives Allison all of the texture that this three-dimensional character requires. She becomes openly derisive of Roy, but also reckless in her own way, and runs the gauntlet of emotions and moods over the course of the film, notably in her growing unease in this house that they can’t afford and that could hold them and all their possessions many times over. She also takes a small step that emphasizes her independence, or at least her refusal to be dependent on such an unreliable man, that also has the side benefit of embarrassing her husband when it comes to light. My cousin Jude is also quite good as Roy, and certainly convincing as that sort of suave confidence man who is just plausible enough that you can see what Allison may have seen in him, but Coon is the absolute star of this movie, and it’s a shame she’s received so little attention on the awards circuit for it, with just a few nominations from local film critics’ circles.

The Nest, like Durkin’s first film, is a slow burn, and the tension lies mostly beneath the movie’s surface, although there’s more of an overt climax in this story than there was in Martha Marcy May Marlene, and also a less ambiguous conclusion. It’s a more polished work, with stronger characterization and a better story arc, although the first film’s ending played better into the idea of a sort of existential terror that this film evokes but doesn’t entirely drive home. They’re both quiet, simple films, however, in a way that might make them hard to sell to a larger audience, but that draw you in because they have the immodesty of reality, and all the pain and suffering it can bring.

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→ February 24, 2021
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The Trial of the Chicago 7.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (now on Netflix) has a great movie at its heart, with all of the quick, witty dialogue you’d expect from an Aaron Sorkin script, but it is the most over-Sorkined thing imaginable. The actual story of the Chicago Eight (later reduced to seven, when Bobby Seale was granted a mistrial) is compelling enough that Sorkin had to do nothing more than supply the dialogue. Instead, he fabricated events and added melodrama to a story that didn’t need it.

The Chicago Seven were seven men who were involved in some way in the protests against the Vietnam War held in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which itself took place in the wake of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy. Those protests descended into violence when the Chicago Police Department responded with violence to the protesters’ mere existence, but the city, and then the new Republican Administration of President Nixon, chose to charge eight men with conspiracy to incite violence. The eighth, Seale, wasn’t at the protests, but was the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, and had the misfortune to be in Chicago for a few hours during the convention, so he was arrested too on a charge that was even more bogus than those faced by the other seven. The trial was a farce, over before it started, thanks in no small part to a judge who kept one foot on the scales the entire time.

Sorkin chose to tell the story of the trial, giving us the protests and the violence through flashbacks, which is a reasonable device for explaining this part of history, especially given the historical populiarty of courtroom dramas on TV and in film. With the cast he’s assembled here to play the courtroom principals, he can get away with most of the action taking place inside that room, giving them the dialogue and letting the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman) and Eddie Redmayne (Tom Hayden) handle the rest.

There are portions of this film that work, which makes it all the worse when Sorkin decides to tinker with the story. The actual courtroom was something of a circus; Hoffman and fellow Yippies co-counder Jerry Rubin (played by Jeremy Strong) did pull a lot of the antics you see in the film, the judge (Frank Langella, good in a one-note role) really was this crooked, and what happens to Bobby Seale in the movie did happen in the real trial. So why would Sorkin insert so much fiction into this narrative? Why would he have the pacifist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) punch a bailiff in the courtroom, when no such thing happened? Why do we get this fake honeytrap storyline around Rubin, with an FBI agent who never existed? Why wouldn’t Sorkin show any of the testimony from the many celebrities, including Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, and Allen Ginsburg, who did appear at the real trial? And the ending of the film, while certainly stirring, is a complete fantasy, and it is maddening that Sorkin decided that actual history wasn’t good enough for him or for us.

Cohen may not quite have the most screen time, but he’s clearly the star of the film, and if anyone gets a nomination for this movie – and the oddsmakers have it getting a whole bushel – it should be him. The secondary framing device showing Hoffman retelling the story of the protests and trial during a standup routine doesn’t work either, but Cohen is tremendous inside the courtroom and in the flashbacks, especially when he’s on the stand – he and Rubin were the only two of the seven to testify – and we get more of Hoffman than just the wisecracks. It’s not really an Oscar-worthy performance because the role itself is too slight, but Cohen runs it right up to its ceiling. Rylance also stands out for his performance here, also in a limited role, and this might be the movie that truly deserves the Best Ensemble Cast award rather than any individual honors.

How this got a nomination for the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama over Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom or The Nest, to name just two superior films, is beyond me. It’s entertaining, beyond a doubt; the movie never drags, and Sorkin can write some great dialogue, but this script is too bombastic, too overwritten, and, weird as it is to say, too slanted in favor of the defendants to call it a great work of art. I’m not even arguing for the side of the prosecution and certainly not the cops, not one of whom was convicted of any crime in connection with the riot they started, but Sorkin is trying so hard to canonize these seven men that he often turns them into cartoon characters. They can be heroes without Sorkin’s help, and the film is worse for his efforts.

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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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→ January 25, 2021
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Boys State.

One casualty of the new streaming wars is that some good films are going to go unseen by a wide swath of the audience, and may miss out on awards consideration for the same reason. The documentary Boys State looks like one of those, as Apple bought its rights after it won the top documentary prize at Sundance, so now it’s on Apple TV+ and unavailable any other way. I only know about it because Will and Tim discussed it on the Grierson & Leitch podcast, and both had it on their top 25 for the year (Will had it at #3), but right now it’s one of the ten best movies I’ve seen from the 2020 slate.

Boys State takes its name from a nationwide series of events run by the American Legion – yes, there is also a separate slate of Girls States – where high school students from around each of the 50 states gather for a long weekend, split into two fictional parties, and then hold elections for major state offices all the way up to Governor. The filmmakers followed the kids at Boys State in Texas in 2018, focusing on four boys in particular who went into the event hoping to run for prominent roles, from party leaders to Governors, while also getting solid representation of ethnic backgrounds and political views.

It’s hardly surprising that we hear a lot of reactionary political statements from these boys as they give speeches early in the film to vie for various positions in their two parties’ apparatuses, notably hardline opposition to gun control and misogynistic views against any sort of abortion rights, with a dash of homophobia and some generally anti-government sentiments thrown in for added flavor. (I do wonder how different that last bit might be whenever they next hold Boys State events, in the wake of the terror attack on the Capitol earlier this month.) What is far more interesting, however, is the extent to which at least some of those comments are performative, or just plain Machiavellian, as one participant who seems to be a hardliner says in a one-on-one moment with the filmmakers that he doesn’t believe these things – he just sees Boys State as a game, and voicing those views is a path to winning.

The four main stars of the film all turn out to be extremely compelling for their presences on camera and for the diversity of their backstories. Steven Garza, who runs for Governor, is the son of a woman who came to the U.S. from Mexico as an undocumented immigrant, and makes his mark on the conference with his compassion and his willingness to find common ground with potential voters through individual discussions. René Otero grabs your attention early in the film with a powerful speech that helps become chairman of one of the two parties, coming across as progressive compared to the room but also managing to sound that way without committing himself too strongly to specific policy ideas. He’s Black, and Garza is Latino, which is notable given how overwhelmingly white the entire student body at Boys State is – the filmmakers clearly made a choice here to follow some nonwhite students. The other two boys at the center of the film are Ben Feinstein, a double-amputee due to childhood meningitis, and seeks to lead the opposite party from Otero; and Robert MacDougall, a good likeness for a young Blake Jenner, and more of what I expected to see from the film – a good ol’ boy, an athlete, and someone who says all the right-wing things.

Where it goes from there surprised me, as not every kid is quite what they seem to be at first, various conflicts arise between and within the two parties, and we see some real growth from a few of the boys even though the event takes place in just a few days. There’s also some organic drama in the run-up to the final elections, including some underhanded tricks on social media, and the ending is far more emotional than I anticipated given the film’s subject. There’s some fat the filmmakers could have trimmed, like the glimpses we get of the event’s talent show, time that could have gone to showing more of the conference’s press corps, who seem to play a more important role than the film lets us see. I might have a little more of a connection to Boys State because I attended some similar events in high school (but not Boys State specifically) and helped run a Model Congress event while I was in college, but Boys State is so well-crafted, and so generous towards its subjects, that I think it’ll appeal to anyone who is able to see it.

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→ January 5, 2021
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Soul.

Soul just doesn’t have one.

I’ve avoided joining the chorus bemoaning the decline in the heart and spirit of Pixar’s scripts since their original batch of ideas, which more or less ended with WALL-E; since then, only Inside Out has met their earlier standard of greatness, although I might concede the point on Toy Story 4, a good movie that didn’t really need to exist (other than to give me a reason to say “traaaash?” to the kids). But it’s true: They’ve gone downhill since they exhausted the first set of concepts, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign that they’re getting back on track. Onward was dismal all around, enough that I have forgotten numerous times that I actually saw that movie in 2020. Some of the sequels have been entertaining, but they’re not very novel, and none has matched its predecessor for ingenuity or insight.

Soul was somewhat more promising, not least because it was the first Pixar movie to star a Black protagonist and feature a largely Black voice cast. That’s praiseworthy, as is the work that went into avoiding the stereotyped depictions of Black Americans in animation throughout history. The score is also great, between the original jazz compositions by Jon Batiste and the ambient background music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (both of Nine Inch Nails). And of course the movie looks fantastic; Pixar’s ability to create realistic-looking landscapes and city scenes has long surpassed my mind’s ability to comprehend it. I know what I’m watching isn’t real, and yet I hesitate.

That makes it all the more disappointing that Soul‘s story is just so flat. It’s Inside Out in the afterworld. It’s Brave without the cool accents. It’s It’s a Wonderful Life with less schmaltz. There’s just nothing new here at all. It doesn’t even offer us something on its main subject – death, and the meaning it ascribes to life.

The quest takes Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a music teacher and jazz pianist who falls down a manhole and ends up on the verge of death – with his soul departing his body in a sort of celestial error and heading into the Great Beyond – on the very day he finally gets what he believes will be the big break in his career. Once there, he runs into 22 (Tina Fey), a wayward soul who has no interest in going to earth and inhabiting a meatsuit as a human being. Joe gets the idea that he can use 22 to earn his way back to his own body, which, of course, goes awry, so the two have to learn some Great Lesson and realize that what they originally wanted was, in fact, not the thing most likely to make them happy.

There’s a lot of humor in Soul, but too much of it comes from side characters. Rachel House is great as Terry, an accountant of souls in the Great Beyond, but she’s just re-creating her policewoman character from The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (which is fantastic, by the way – both the movie and her role in it). Graham Norton has some good lines as Moonwind, a sign twirler on Earth who is a sort of pirate soul in the Great Beyond. Daveed Diggs is mostly wasted in a minor role as a friend of Joe’s, and Richard Ayoade and Alice Braga are underutilized as two of the many counselors in the Great Beyond who are all, for some reason, named Jerry. Fey gets some big laughs when her character first appears, but the script doesn’t keep 22’s manic energy going for very long, and Joe is just a straight man here.

I could live with all of that if the script had anything to say on its main theme, but it doesn’t. This is pop philosophy at best, some pablum about appreciating the life you have, and living it to its fullest, rather than striving for, say, what culture or society tell you are the marks of success or of a happy life. The elegy to life as one worth living is a good message, but hardly one we haven’t seen hundreds of times. It’s the main point of It’s a Wonderful Life, and that movie is 75 years old.

I don’t mean to disparage the importance of Soul‘s representation, which will probably be its most lasting legacy, and perhaps continue to create opportunities for filmmakers, in and beyond animation, who are themselves people of color or wish to build stories around people of color. Soul is superficially entertaining, easy on the eyes, and well-paced. It’s better than Onward, or Monsters University, or Finding Dory, but not as good as Coco, which had something to say and spotlighted an entire culture, or Inside Out, which sits in the top echelon of Pixar’s films for its pairing of real insight on the human brain and the powerful emotional resonance of its story. Soul, for all its jazz, just didn’t move the needle.

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→ December 29, 2020
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The Prom.

The thing with musicals is that, even if the plot is good, shouldn’t you remember at least one of the songs after you’ve watched it?

I actually liked The Prom, which has received some scathing reviews and mixed marks overall, even with some obvious flaws, from a hackneyed plot to the choice to cast a straight actor as a gay character at the center of the film, but the biggest problem with the movie is that the music just isn’t any good. I couldn’t sing or hum a single tune from the movie within a few hours after we turned it off. No musical can work like that, even when the feel-good story feels good, the lead actress is a star in the making, and some great actors are quite game for a script that doesn’t always serve them well.

The premise of The Prom, which was a Broadway musical before coming to Netflix and may have seemed fresher or more current when it debuted, is familiar: A high school in Indiana cancels its prom rather than let a student bring their same-sex partner as a date to the event. The student, Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), is out, but her girlfriend isn’t. Her principal (Keegan Michael-Key) is supportive, and sees this as a civil rights issue, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) heads the opposition, spouting some typical bromides about family values, life choices, and ‘won’t somebody please think of the children.’ (I found it interesting that they cast a Black actor in that role, perhaps to avoid bringing race into a story about defending  LGBTQ rights.) Four Broadway actors, two of whom have just learned their brand new show has received such savage reviews that it’s likely to close after just one night, get wind of this story and decide to head to Indiana to rally behind Emma – and give their own careers a boost of good publicity. Needless to say, this isn’t how things go once they arrive.

The four actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells, all of whom throw themselves completely into their rather absurd characters. Streep plays the diva, Corden her flamboyantly gay co-star, and both profess to be rather unaware of how the hoi polloi might live (although we later learn that’s a put-on). Kidman is a permanent understudy who never got her big break, and Rannells is “between gigs” and happens to be tending bar at the afterparty for Streep and Corden’s show. Kidman is, unsurprisingly if you’ve seen much of her work (like To Die For), the film’s secret weapon, sporting a convincing New York accent and giving her slim character her all, especially in her one big song, “Zazz,” a gentle satire of Chicago’s “All That Jazz” that unfortunately lacks the dancing part that would seal the homage. Rannells has even less to do, but does it well, especially in the song that sends up the show that made him a star, The Book of Mormon, where he responds to the argument that the Bible forbids homosexuality with a song that points out that it also forbids tattoos and the wearing of hats.

The story doesn’t really work if you squint at it, although that’s true of a lot of musicals, and many of the classics have plots that are little more than afterthoughts in service of the music. The resolution relies on a rather substantial plot contrivance, something the viewer knows for most of the movie, that is just too convenient. Some of the subplots actually work better – Key’s principal being a huge fan both of Streep and of Broadway in general, James Corden’s estrangement from his parents – but the script strains too hard to make the main storyline, which itself feels a few years out of date, work.

It succeeds in spite of itself, in large part because of Pellman, who makes her film debut in The Prom and looks every bit a star in the making. With her girlfriend still closeted, Emma carries most of the weight of the kids’ part of the storyline – her girlfriend is the only other teenaged character with any depth here – and Pellman is more than able to carry her share even in scenes with Streep and Kidman, two great actors who can be dominant on-screen, and when she finally gets a scene of her own, singing “Unruly Heart” as her character starts a Youtube channel and takes charge of her own side of the publicity battle.

Corden has come in for a fair amount of criticism for the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay character, and for doing so with some effeminate flourishes that lean a little bit into stereotype. I can’t argue the point, but from a straight performance perspective, Corden was fine. He’ll never not be Smithy to me, but he was more than adequate here, and was enough of a presence to counterbalance Streep, who is the good kind of hammy for most of the film, even though the script really lets her down in several ways.

But all of this comes with the basic problem I had with The Prom: There isn’t a single song in it that I could still recall a few hours after we finished the film. I enjoyed the experience of watching it, but a musical without good music is a rather empty shell, with barely enough plot to fill a short film. The Happiest Season, a holiday film on Hulu starring Kristen Stewart, had a rather similar plot at the core of its story, and handled it more deftly and with bigger laughs, even though it relies on some hackneyed tropes in its story. So while I liked The Prom just enough, there’s no staying power to it, and, unlike with most musicals, I have no real interest in watching it again.

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→ December 14, 2020
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Yes, God, Yes.

Yes, God, Yes is a delightful indictment of the way many puritanical religions, in this case particularly Catholicism, treat basic human sexuality, in a devilishly satirical, 80-minute comedy that features plenty of little nods to the culture right around the year 2000. Starring Natalia Dyer (Stranger Things) as Alice, who gets an unexpected window into the world of sex via an AOL chat room, the story follows Alice as she goes on a four-day indoctrination retreat with her Catholic school and encounters the rank hypocrisy of the religion.

Alice’s morality teacher, Father Murphy (of course), teaches that sex is only for procreation, and that when it comes to sexual desire, boys are like microwaves (turned on easily, no warm-up required) while girls are like conventional ovens. This useful lecture comes right before she receives a pornographic image from a creep she encounters in that online chatroom, which leads her to try masturbating for the first time – something she’s been told, repeatedly, will send her to hell. She’s also the subject of a nasty rumor that she engaged in a sex act with another student, but she doesn’t even know what the act is because she’s unfamiliar with the term used for it. She then heads off on that retreat, which is Kairos by another name, where she discovers that many people in charge of the endeavor don’t exactly practice what they preach.

Masturbation, specifically a girl masturbating, is at the heart of the story here, and that alone makes Yes, God, Yes rather unusual – if that act appears at all in movies, it’s usually boys doing it, and usually just played for laughs. That’s notable in and of itself; women’s sexuality is generally ignored in movies, or seen as something immoral or sinful, as in horror movies that kill off any of the teenagers having sex. To this film’s credit, Alice’s masturbation isn’t treated as a joke, but as a natural part of the story, and a way to keep throwing her into religious doubt. Her sneaking around also lands her in trouble, which in turn lets her see what some of the other campers – and authority figures – are up to.

The script doesn’t pull its punches on Catholicism – not its treatment of all non-procreative sex as sinful, not its inherent subjugation of women – and even ends with a coda that depicts devout Catholics as both provincial and uncurious, even as Alice realizes there’s a world beyond the walls of her parochial school. The film doesn’t delve into questions of faith, but deals with the real-world impacts of the man-made doctrines, which require willful ignorance of human biology and sexuality, and allows the question of why these myriad rules even exist when the Christian Bible has barely anything from Jesus himself about sex to lay unanswered at the edges of the story. Once Alice goes through the looking glass by seeing that single pornographic image, she’s on a path where she’s going to question far more than just what the Church told her about sex.

Dyer was one of the weaker actors on Stranger Things, partly because her character wasn’t that interesting, but also because she played Nancy so flatly, only coming to life when she got involved in a combat scene. She’s better here, because she has more to do, although I still don’t get a lot of energy from her performances. She’s at her best in Yes, God, Yes when Alice is befuddled, confused, or surprised by something, but less convincing when she’s angry, spiteful, or, in one scene, trying to be passionate. The film does rest largely on her, as there isn’t another major character and most of the secondary ones are pretty one-note, and in that sense she is more than up to the task.

Yes, God, Yes premiered way back at SXSW in March of 2019, but the pandemic wrecked its release schedule, and after a very limited run in drive-throughs and via virtual cinema, it went to Netflix in October. At a scant 78 minutes, it’s just the right length for its subject, and if you’re a lapsed Catholic like me, I think you’ll especially enjoy it.

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