→ April 8, 2025
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The Brutalist.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, sweeping character study rich with detail and allegory, powered by a tremendous (and Oscar-winning) performance by Adrien Brody as the title character, memorable and meticulous scenery, and one of the strongest scores of the year. It’s also far too often a slog, running three and a half hours, with too much inconsistency in the pacing and the level of specificity from scene to scene. (You can rent it now on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Brody plays László Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect in Hungary before World War II who is sent to the concentration camp in Buchenwald by the Nazis, while his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are sent to Dachau. Tóth survives the camp and immigrates the United States, where he works in his cousin Attila’s furniture store, although Attila’s Catholic wife clearly doesn’t approve. Attila lands a major renovation project for Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) as a surprise for his father, the wealthy Carnegie-esque Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), putting Tóth in charge. Tóth’s designs transform the library space, but Van Buren is enraged that his son made these plans without him, firing the contractors and refusing to pay. Attila kicks László out, which leads to him working as a manual laborer and living in a charity workhouse, while his previous use of morphine has devolved into a heroin addiction. Tóth’s design for the library ends up earning so much praise that Van Buren tracks him down and hires him for a major new project … and that’s all before the intermission, before Erszébet and Zsófia make it to the United States, before the stresses of the project and the exacting (and conflicting) standards of the two men begin to clash.

The Brutalist is a biopic of a fictional character, much like 2022’s Tár, that feels so specific that it’s easy to forget that Lázsló Tóth never existed. Brody is as good as ever – and I’d argue he’s always good, even in small roles like in Grand Budapest Hotel or Midnight in Paris – as the complex, tortured genius, who has some of the expected art-over-commerce philosophy, but also carries the weight of the trauma of his time in Buchenwald, his long separation from his wife, and his flight to a culture that is deeply foreign to him and that faces him with both its xenophobia and its antisemitism. Even in some of the film’s least believable scenes, his portrayal never wavers in the least, and he carries huge portions of the overlong script by himself.

The padding in The Brutalist is all around the edges, rather than entire scenes that needed to go (although the first scene of the Tóths in bed after their reunion probably could have been left on the cutting room floor). There’s a brief shot of László and some workers carrying a model of the community center he’s building for Van Buren up a flight of stairs into the mansion, probably lasting ten or fifteen seconds; the scene adds nothing, and there are tiny moments like that throughout the film that add up to make the film feel too long. Corbet, who directed and co-wrote the film, has a pace-of-play problem. It’s like he hired James Murphy as his editor.

Jones is somewhat lost here in a bad haircut and overdone accent, although the real problem is that her character barely exists outside of László’s orbit until her very last scene, when she acquires a force and gravity we haven’t seen before, underscored by the character’s infirmity and Jones’s own petite stature. (She’s nearly a foot shorter than Brody.) The movie isn’t about her, of course, but her absence is a huge shadow cast over the first half of the film, with László grieving the possibility of her death and then finding out she’s alive but can’t emigrate legally to join him, making the incomplete development of her character in the second half more obvious.

That’s generally a problem with the plot as a whole: the first half is itself a whole movie, and the second half isn’t. It’s the shell of a movie, but tries to pack in too much while giving it a similar level of detail, and that makes for irregular pacing and some portions that were just outright boring. There are also two sexual assault scenes, one entirely implied, one on-screen but shot from a distance, and neither is handled well – the first one is just dropped entirely, and the second has absolutely nothing to foreshadow it, making it seem like either a clumsy attempt at metaphor or just a very cheap plot contrivance to set up the denouement. After thinking about it what broader points Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold might have been trying to make, I’m leaning towards the metaphor argument: A huge theme in The Brutalist is how inhospitable Tóth finds the United States, a country that, then and now, has held great hostility towards people from just about any other country, and has a very long and shameful history of antisemitism that still exists today. The assault is an act of degradation and dehumanization, emphasized by his assailant’s taunts during the attack. I don’t think the scene fits in the least in the film, but that’s the best I’ve been able to make sense of it.

The Brutalist is a proper epic, an ambitious film that tries to do more than almost any film I’ve seen in the last few years; the closest parallel I could think of was 2018’s Never Look Away, another long film covering a huge portion of an artist’s life, although even that one doesn’t try to tackle the giant themes Corbet and Fastvold cover here. Brody’s performance is remarkable – and I didn’t even mention how great some of his suits are, which would be useful information for me if I weren’t half his size – and the film looks like it should have cost as much as a Marvel movie. I’m holding it to a higher standard primarily because it’s over 200 minutes long, and if you’re going to ask that of your audience, you need to earn their attention repeatedly. I’m not entirely sure The Brutalist does that; even so, it’s a film to laud in the hopes it inspires more big swings just like it.

The Brutalist earned ten nominations at this year’s Oscars and won three, for Brody as Best Actor, for Lol Crawley for Best Cinematography, and for Daniel Blumberg for Best Original Score, deserving of all three of them. (I’ll note that 1) Tim Grierson pointed out to me that Blumberg was briefly the lead singer & guitarist for a British band called Yuck, and 2) the strongest competitors for those last two awards weren’t nominated, Nickel Boys for Cinematography and Challengers for Original Score.) Pearce is strong as Van Buren and certainly has enough to do that he was worthy of a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but Jones’s character isn’t that well-written and her performance within it is one of the film’s weak points; I would have much preferred to see her Best Supporting Actress nomination go to Julianne Moore for The Room Next Door. I have The Brutalist in my top ten for the year, with probably just one more worthy film to go (I’m Still Here), but I wouldn’t have picked it over Anora for Best Picture.

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→ April 4, 2025
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The Wallcreeper.

I found Nell Zink’s debut novel The Wallcreeper in the $4 section at the back of Changing Hands in Tempe, and figured it was worth the shot given that it was less than 200 pages and seemed on a quick search to be rather critically acclaimed. It was more than worth the cost, although I am having a hard time explaining exactly why this book is so good. It’s a mad, meandering, hilarious book that obeys very few of the rules of postmodern literature, which doesn’t have any rules to begin with.

The Wallcreeper is narrated by Tiffany, who is married to Steve; the two of them are birders, although Steve is the more ardent of the two, and they have a pet wallcreeper. That bird isn’t native to Germany or Switzerland, where they live during the course of the novel, but they kept it because Steve was driving one day while Tiff was pregnant, and when he swerved to avoid hitting the bird, it caused Tiff to miscarry. This sequence, right at the start of the novel, is stated with almost comic nonchalance, setting the tone from the start. Tiff’s narration is close to stream-of-consciousness; it’s nonlinear, nonsensical, unreliable, and very funny, often when it’s hardly appropriate.

The story follows the couple through copious infidelities on both sides, Steve’s obscure job that is keeping the two Americans in Europe, a relocation, more infidelities, a tragedy, another tragedy, and some birds. The two even hook up with an activist group and go on to commit some light ecoterrorism, which has unexpected consequences.

Through it all, it’s hard to tell what Tiff really feels about anything – herself, her husband, her various lovers, everything except for the destruction of the planet, which has Tiff, like most of us who realize what’s happening, reeling from utter hopelessness to the desire to do anything that might make a difference. She’s inscrutable as a character, other than her sheer determination, even though it’s not always applied to the best courses of action.

To say anything more about The Wallcreeper risks spoiling the few plot elements that remain – and the wonder of discovering this character, and Zink’s unique voice. The only novel I can recall reading in the last five years that was anything like this was No One Is Talking About This, where author Patricia Lockwood also utilized a stream-of-consciousness narration technique, although hers is more informed by social media. Both authors employ postmodern techniques without dispensing with plot or character development as so many other postmodern authors do (in my lay opinion), and even when I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on in Wallcreeper or whether I liked the novel, I couldn’t stop reading.

Next up: As I’m writing this review, I’m still reading T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call.

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→ April 3, 2025
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The Room Next Door.

Pedro Almodóvar waited until his 23rd feature film to make his first one in English, released the same month as the Spanish director turned 75. The Room Next Door, an adaptation of part of a Sigrid Nunez novel, is an intense movie about friendship and duty, driven by two outstanding performances by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, a sort of women-centered parallel to his 2022 film Pain & Glory. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Ingrid (Moore) is signing copes of her latest book when an old acquaintance reaches the table and informs her that their former colleague Martha (Swinton) has cervical cancer. Ingrid visits Martha, whom she hasn’t seen in many years, and the two begin spending more time together, as Ingrid realizes Martha is quite lonely, with only an estranged daughter remaining of her family. When a promising treatment turns out to be unsuccessful, Martha decides to end her life on her own terms and asks Ingrid to accompany her to a house in the country, so that Martha knows someone who cares about her is in the room next door as she dies. Ingrid ends up agreeing, and the remainder of the film follows the two women through the last few weeks of Martha’s life.

There are only three characters of any significance in The Room Next Door, with John Turturro appearing as Martha’s former husband and Ingrid’s former lover, putting all of the pressure on Swinton and Moore to carry the film – and, naturally, two of the greatest actors of their generation are up to the task. Swinton’s performance is the more surprising of the pair’s, as she’s largely understated throughout the film; she’s played big or weird or both so often in recent years that it’s a treat to see her dial it back like this. Martha’s insecure and maybe neurotic, but resigned to her death, in contrast to Ingrid, whose latest book is about her own crippling fear of dying, and Swinton gives the character the right combination of nervous energy with a touch of irascibility. Ingrid is the more straightforward character, although Moore’s challenge is navigating the wide range of emotions she faces across the film – it’s clear at the start that she and Martha were never that close, or at least Ingrid didn’t think they were, so she ends up growing fonder of Martha as Martha’s death becomes inevitable and the favors she asks become more significant.

(As an aside, I realized after watching this that I’d never seen Michael Clayton, the 2007 film for which Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress – still her only Oscar nomination – so I watched it. That performance is also quite understated, and also one of her best.)

The production itself is lavish, visually and metaphorically. Nearly every scene pops with strong, vivid colors, even more so when they head out of the city to a luxurious house in the woods, with gorgeous shots of the forest just beyond the house’s deck. Almodóvar has a long history of using red for its symbolic value; the door to Martha’s room is red, and she wears deep reds many times in the film, while the chaise longue where Ingrid usually reclines on the deck is also red, certainly an unusual color (and fabric) for outdoor furniture. (Martha lays on the green one.) There’s also a sense of wealth and even abundance throughout the film that cuts both ways –these are two privileged women who can afford to do this and, for Martha, face the potential consequences; yet the contrast between this lush setting and the inevitability of Martha’s death underscores that all the money in the world can’t change the fact that we’re mortal.

The estranged daughter does appear near the end of the film, providing a brief but somewhat telling coda that gives a little more insight into Martha’s character – and into Ingrid’s as well. We know Martha’s going to die before the end, but rather than concluding on the most morbid note, or with something clichéd like a funeral, the story ends with a conversation and a scene on the deck that connects to an earlier scene. Both scenes include passages from Joyce’s short story The Dead, while earlier Martha and Ingrid also watch John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation – laying it on a bit thick, I suppose, although it is considered one of the greatest short stories written in the English language. Almodóvar has settled into a mellower groove as he’s aged, dispensing with the sort of shocking elements that helped make his reputation as an avant-garde filmmaker while he focuses more on character development and dialogue. The Room Next Door is (at least) his third straight film in this vein, and I think it’s the best of the trio thanks to the two lead performances.

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→ April 1, 2025
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American Fiction.

American Fiction is the first film adaptation of any of Percival Everett’s thirty novels, although its resounding success means it won’t be the last – an adaptation of James is already in the works (good!) with Taika Waititi possibly directing (so very, very bad). Directed by Cord Jefferson, who won the Oscar for his screenplay, the film adheres quite closely to the novel, which was called Erasure, until the very end, when Jefferson takes some creative license that pokes a little fun at Everett’s own ending but doesn’t entirely stick its metafictional landing. (It’s streaming free on Amazon Prime or you can rent it on iTunes.)

Once again, we meet Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a professor and author of arcane novels that don’t sell, here in a new scene where he lashes out at a performatively offended white student in one of his classes, leading his employers to put him on leave. He travels to New York to meet with his agent, and to visit his aging mother (Lesley Uggams) and his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a doctor who provides reproductive health services. His mother is showing early signs of dementia, while we learn that his relationship with Lisa and their brother Bill (Sterling K. Brown) has always been distant. While traveling, he comes across a bestselling novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, by Black author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), an Oberlin graduate who has written a book that Monk thinks panders to white guilt, engaging in gross and dated stereotypes about Black Americans. Lisa dies very early in the film, in one of the most significant alterations from Erasure, and when their mother clearly needs to enter assisted living, Monk suddenly has some significant financial issues. He sits down and writes a novel, My Pafology, that parodies Golden’s book and the benevolent racism of the publishing industry, intending (he says) to offend the editors who receive it. Instead, he gets a seven-figure bonus (25% higher than the figure in the book, which was written 25 years ago) and everyone wants to meet the fictitious author Stagg R. Leigh, whom Monk invents as he goes along. As his personal life becomes more difficult, the book becomes more successful, until he finds himself on the judging panel for the Literary Award … and his book is one of the leading candidates.

Jefferson does a fantastic job weaving the twin narratives of the book – the family subplot and the Pafology subplot – together in a way that feels fluid, since he lacks the natural transitions that come with chapter breaks, and the two only truly intersect a few times in the novel. He’s kept the bones of the plot and most of the details are the same, although he changes a few character names (including Adam Brody’s movie producer) and creates some overly dramatic scenes involving Monk’s mother. There are also more outright laughs here than in the source, and the relationships between Monk and his two siblings are softened, which allows some fantastic scenes between Wright and Brown later in the film.

Wright is spectacular here – this is a well-written, three-dimensional character, and Wright just is Monk. He inhabits this character in every way, and when Monk has to act as Stagg, Wright telegraphs not just his discomfort at playing “Black,” but that this character was raised to not speak or act a certain way, leaving him flummoxed when he has to become Stagg R. Leigh on the phone and once in person. He’s just as strong in the family scenes, showing how Monk struggles with his interpersonal relationships even with people he clearly cares about; he doesn’t lack empathy or feelings, but – forgive the hackneyed phrase – sometimes he can’t get out of his own way. Brown and Uggams are also excellent in their respective roles, with Brown, like Wright, earning an Oscar nomination for this performance; Uggams probably just doesn’t get enough screen time to say she was robbed of a Best Supporting Actress nod – I don’t think she passes the Judi Dench Barrier here – but she’s superb in the limited time she gets, as is Erika Alexander as Monk’s love interest, Coraline.

I wasn’t bothered by Jefferson sharpening some of the edges and inserting some extra drama; Brody’s movie producer character even says in the film at one point that a movie made from a novel can’t be the novel, because you just don’t have enough time, and I think that can also apply to character development. Even changing the manner of Lisa’s death makes sense, because what happens in the book is tied to something larger that the movie would simply not have time to address, at least not in a satisfying fashion.

The ending, however … I will concede the argument that the book ends in a way that would probably not work on film. The movie might not even get made. I liked the ending of Erasure, but it’s unconventional, and would have been even more so in a movie. Jefferson’s solution is creative, certainly, but I’m not sure it works. Metafictional twists like that one are hard to pull off, and if you start thinking about this one, you’ll probably end up with a headache. The final, final shot, though, is excellent, so maybe it’s best to just not ponder the climax too thoroughly. Adapting a book as rich and sardonic as Erasure could not have been easy, and Jefferson managed to get the tone right without having to make any significant changes to the meat of the novel.

I’ve seen nine of the ten movies that were nominated for Best Picture in this year, and I’d put American Fiction pretty comfortably in the middle of the group. The Zone of Interest, which I didn’t see until November of last year and never wrote up, would be my top choice, and I wouldn’t put this over Past Lives or Oppenheimer, but it’s in the next tier with Barbie and The Holdovers for me. Wright never had a chance to beat Cillian Murphy for Best Actor, but if this movie were going to win any award for anything, he would have been my pick.

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→ March 31, 2025
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Erasure.

Erasure was Percival Everett’s breakthrough novel, the twelfth one he published but the first to gain widespread acclaim and attention – ironic, in a small way, as it is in part a novel about the conflict between art and commerce, the need to create against the need to make a buck. Adapted into 2023’s Oscar-winning film American Fiction, Erasure is a masterpiece of biting, humorous satire, a work that holds up twenty years later in a world that hasn’t actually changed that much from the one in which it’s set.

Thelonious Ellison, known to friends and acquaintances as Monk, is a professor of literature and an author of inscrutable, dense novels that don’t sell. He lives in Los Angeles, far from his aging mother and sister Lisa, the latter of whom provides reproductive health services, including abortions, at her clinic in or outside D.C. Their brother Bill, who recently came out as gay, lives in Arizona; Bill and Lisa are close, but Monk is distant from both of them, and was their late father’s favorite in their telling.

Monk is appalled to find that a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a Black woman named Juanita Mae Jenkins, has become a critical and commercial success by pandering to white people’s sterotypes of Black America – even though Jenkins herself grew up privileged and the stories within the book aren’t hers. In his indignation over Jenkins’s success, and facing a sudden need to help pay for his mother to enter a memory-care facility, Monk writes a pandering novel of his own called My Pafology, submitting it under the pseudonym Stagg R. Lee. To his surprise, and his agent’s, the book sells immediately, and suddenly Monk has a Springtime for Hitler-like smash on his hands – and eventually ends up faced with the potential that he might win the Literary Award, a National Book Award-like honor for which Monk is also one of the judges.

Erasure is a masterpiece. It’s bursting with different themes and potential interpretations; Monk is a wonderfully complex and three-dimensional character; Everett balances his protagonist’s difficult personal life against the madness of his commercial breakthrough. It’s a satire of the publishing industry, sure, but Everett’s eye is much more on the white-savior racism of publishing and later Hollywood, and how Black creators are happy to contribute to it if it makes them rich. My Pafology, which Monk later retitles to something else I won’t spoil, has Black poverty, absentee fathers, guns, drugs, promiscuity, and the other requirements of white-published Black literature of the time, all written in a parody of AAVE that flies right over every white reader’s heads … but Monk is appalled to find that there’s a Black audience for the book as well, with an Oprah-like TV host also praising both his book and Jenkins’s for their realism and authenticity.

Everett’s biting wit and sense of irony are in top form here, with humor both from the repartee between Monk and some of the other characters and from the situations Monk encounters in the publishing side of the story. These characters are all intelligent, so the dialogue is sharp and often extremely funny, especially between Monk and Bill. The entire farcical plot line of the book becoming a sensation when Monk didn’t think any publisher would want it – and his agent refuses at first to even submit it to publishers – provides a natural “and of course that happened next” subtext that’s more facepalm-funny than the laugh-out-loud kind. The white critics on the Literary Award panel might seem a little overdrawn, but a look at the novels that have won the major U.S. literary prizes in the last fifteen or so years only underlines Everett’s point – if anything, he predicted this shift towards awarding fiction that critics think is Very Important, which isn’t to say they’re picking the wrong books but that the’ve gone from one type of bias in the selection process to another.

The farce of My Pafology is a stark contrast to the second story within Erasure, that of Monk’s family and his difficulty maintaining strong interpersonal relationships. He learns early in the book that his mother has Alzheimer’s, while there’s another death in the family around the same point in the story, both of which serve to push him to write the pandering novel, but also create new situations where he has to confront some of his past choices to remain separate from his family, which includes Lorraine, who has been the Ellisons’ housekeeper since Monk and his siblings were little. Everett also gives Monk a romantic subplot when he connects with someone who lives near their family beach house, but after the initial sparks cool off, Monk finds himself in familiar waters, erecting new boundaries and holding himself apart from – or perhaps just above – his new girlfriend. It might have felt leaden if it weren’t all set against a ridiculous parallel plot where Monk has fallen into a big pile of money and the potential for fame he doesn’t want.

This all has to come to a head at some point, and Everett lands in a perfect spot, avoiding the sentimental conclusion (which would be so unlike him) while also choosing not to give Monk some horrific Tony Last-style resolution. I imagine the end won’t satisfy everyone, but this is probably the best path out of the story Everett could have written.

Is this Everett’s best novel of the five I’ve read? I’ve been pondering that since I finished the book on Friday. Every one of those books has been so different than the others that comparisons seem foolish; James somehow seems like the strongest work because of the restrictions that come with writing within another person’s work, while Erasure is more precise in its construction, and has the benefit of humor.

As for the film, I’ll review that next.

Next up: T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, already nominated for this year’s Nebula Award.

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→ March 26, 2025
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Adolescence.

For three episodes, the new Netflix series Adolescence delivers some of the best television content I’ve ever seen, both in writing and in performances. Each episode is recorded as one continuous shot, and walks us through a different hour (roughly) in a different day across the case of a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a female classmate. That fourth episode, however, makes some curious editorial choices, shifting the focus to characters who probably don’t belong at the center of this kind of story, and even some strong acting can’t totally salvage the conclusion.

The first episode opens with two police officers, DI Bascombe (Ashley “Asher D” Walters) and DS Frank (Faye Marsay), as they prepare to storm a suburban house to arrest a suspect, 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper, in his first film role). We follow them in the police van to the station, through processing and the initial interrogation, and it’s only near the very end of the episode that we learn any details about the crime and why the police think he did it. The second episode, taking place two days later, focuses on the two cops and their investigation, particularly DI Bascombe’s interest in learning a motive. Because much of the theme of the series is the social difficulties that teenagers face as a result of social media, this turns out to be a significant episode for our understanding of Jamie’s potential motives and what his life was like before the murder.

The third episode is the big one, the one that’s going to win all the awards for writing and for its two actors, as nearly the entire hour takes place in a room at the juvenile detention center where Jamie is being held as he awaits trial. Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) is an independent psychologist hired by his attorneys to provide a report on his state of mind and understanding of everything that’s happening; it’s not their first such appointment, so they can jump right into the conversation, and it becomes heated and intense as Jamey displays an inability to regulate his emotions that we haven’t seen previously. It’s a tour de force performance from Cooper, as the one-shot gimmick requires him to shapeshifter from petulant teenager into a demon who can’t contain his rage and frustration in a matter of seconds. It ends on an extremely powerful note, maybe the defining moment of the series.

That fourth episode, though, is a letdown, even though series co-creator Stephen Graham, who plays Jamie’s father Eddie, delivers a strong performance as this episode’s protagonist. The camera is on him, his wife, and their daughter for the entire hour, focusing on the aftereffects of Jamie’s arrest, which of course has upended their lives and made them pariahs in the neighborhood. There’s even a horrifying and too-accurate scene where a big-box hardware store employee recognizes Eddie and reveals that he thinks Jamie is innocent, citing a bunch of the counterfactual nonsense you might encounter in the Qanon-adjacent corners of the internet. It’s such a reflection of the world in which a third of the United States seems to be living, one totally disconnected from reality, willing to ignore the obvious facts in favor of lunatic conspiracy theories.

This episode makes a choice to center Jamie’s family, which continues a theme of the entire series, which is that the family of the victim, Katie, doesn’t exist. We never see Katie’s parents, or any grieving family members. The closest we get is her friend. This even echoes comments from DS Frank in episode 2 about how a murder like this tends to cast the spotlight on the killer, not the victim, only to have the victim and her family erased from the series, especially the last half. The entire focus in the final hour of Adolescence is on how hard this has all been on Jamie’s parents and his sister. And this has been done before: it’s the entire theme of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsey’s excellent but almost unwatchable adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel about the mother of a boy who murders a bunch of his classmates at high school. That film is an incisive portrait of a woman tormented by guilt over her parenting, whether her decisions somehow led her son to commit this atrocity, whether she did enough to try to stop him when it was clear that something about him was off – and why her husband wouldn’t listen. Adolescence doesn’t grapple with its perpetrator’s parents at anywhere near the same depth, which is an acceptable choice if the script also chose to acknowledge that there is another family dealing with an even greater grief. Graham and his co-writer Jack Thorne chose instead to focus only on Jamie’s family, and that undercuts so much of what the series aimed to accomplish. There’s way too much good in the first three-quarters of the series for this particular choice to undo it; I just kept waiting for them to show Katie’s family, somehow, and the failure to do so took something away from the series for me.

(Apropos of nothing, I could have sworn Jemma Redgrave appeared in the initial scene of the raid on Jamie’s house, but she’s not credited anywhere. I’m curious if anyone else thought they spotted her.)

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→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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→ March 18, 2025
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September 5.

September 5 takes the story of the murder of most of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics and tells it from a novel perspective: that of the ABC producers and staff broadcasting the Olympics to the United States audience. The shift makes it as much a story about journalism and about the way people react to crises in real time as a story about the attack itself, allowing the film to hold the tragedy at arm’s length without trivializing its impact, and the result is a true thriller even if you already know all of the details of the ending. (It’s streaming free on Paramount+ or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

We begin behind the scenes with what seems like another day of coverage, watching Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decide to focus on the despair of one of the losing swimmers after one of Mark Spitz’s victories, along with a mundane argument about what events to air between Arledge and two of his lieutenants in the control room, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Baden (Ben Chaplin). Not long afterwards, several other staffers, including the translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch), think they hear gunshots, and soon afterwards the group learns of the attack and the first killings, leading to a series of decisions of how to cover the events – doing so with a staff and crew there to cover sports, not breaking news, and certainly not this kind of crisis – and how best to leverage their position to benefit ABC. The producers even resort to some subterfuge to get a staffer inside the police perimeter, stare down German authorities who storm the control room to shut them down, and try to learn the fate of the hostages – with the last leading to the one big mistake that the decision-makers make over the course of crisis.

I’m a sucker for a good journalism story, so September 5 is catnip to me, and this movie does an excellent job of keeping the tension ratcheted up to 10 while barely leaving the control room, driving almost everything through dialogue. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars, and that’s its greatest strength – there’s no fat on this script, and even though the crisis unfolds outside of the room where our characters are, the film doesn’t lose the claustrophobic sense that comes with a movie in a single, enclosed setting. It’s also unusual in the way it creates so much tension through a story where none of the named characters are ever in any sort of peril

The script doesn’t quite pay sufficient attention to the human tragedy that drives the drama in the control room, however. There are some mentions here and there of individual athletes, and a discussion of the possibility that someone might be shot live on camera where his parents might see it, but by and large this is a movie about the people in the control room. You may argue it’s just not that kind of movie, or that its lean running time – which is just right for the story it’s telling – requires it to skimp on treating the tragedy as such; I think the script could have done more to humanize the events at its core, and in the process giving its characters more empathy in the moment, unless Arledge and Mason and Bader were all just extremely callous men in real life. (Marianne is the one member of the big four characters who isn’t based on a real person, but Benesch – who was outstanding in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge – is so damn good here that I didn’t mind the fabrication one bit.)

The three actors portraying the three real-life ABC employees are all solid, but Magaro – who was excellent in a secondary role in Past Lives and as a mentally ill man in Showing Up – is the standout here, in part because his character has some more complexity and ends up confronting the biggest decision of the day, the one that happens to go wrong for the group. Sarsgaard and Chaplin are solid, but their characters can seem inert by comparison to Mason or Marianne, who show more emotion and seem more attuned to the human tragedy taking place just a few hundred yards away.

This movie is just too much in my wheelhouse for me to dislike it; I was riveted for most of its 90 minutes, once the attack begins and the movie just kicks into drive, never downshifting until the last few minutes. I can recognize its flaws with some separation from watching it, but I was probably as engrossed in September 5 as I’ve been in any movie I’ve watched from the 2024 cycle. It’s so well-told and well-paced that I never had the mental bandwidth to consider what might be missing.

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→ March 17, 2025
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Interior Chinatown.

Interior Chinatown is one of the most inventive, unusual, and funny books I’ve read in the last several years. It’s as if Percival Everett wrote a book about the Chinese immigrant experience in America, while satirizing Hollywood’s special sort of pigeonholing discrimination for people of east Asian descent along the way.

Charles Yu writes Interior Chinatown as if it’s a film treatment – all of the daily occurrences in our protagonist Willis Wu’s life come through the lens of a police procedural called Black and White, starring a Black male cop and a white female cop who have the usual not-witty banter and unaddressed sexual tension. (It reminded me of those abysmal Bacardi commercials about a pair of spies or whatever they were named … Bacardi and Cola. I’ll let you guess which was the Black guy.) Willis is a Generic Asian Male who usually plays Background Oriental Male, but hopes to work his way up to Kung Fu Guy some day, a status achieved by his father, who is now a sad, drunken Old Asian Man. The lives of Willis and his neighbors in Chinatown are split between the way they act when they’re on screen, falling into accented English and stereotypical behaviors, and when they’re off it, both of which constrain their futures, seen through Willis’s parents. The one exception is Willis’s Older Brother, who was on his way to becoming Kung Fu Guy but left Chinatown to go to law school, disappearing from the scene literally and figuratively. Willis eventually reaches a breaking point with this life and demands a bigger role, which he gets, but when he’s killed on the show he has to take 45 days off before he can work again – which puts a damper on his budding romance with another character on the show, Karen Lee.

The whole endeavor is gloriously absurd and Yu never breaks with the conceit. Everything is theater, and written as such, right down to the font choice and the equivalent of chapter and section breaks. The dialogue from the show is spot-on with the nonsense we see on copaganda network shows, and even the Black actor/character points out that he’s pigeonholed in his own way. (Yu could have kept going – south Asian characters, Muslim or Arab characters, and so on, each placed in their own little buckets by oh-so-progressive Hollywood.) It’s quite a trick to make racism and discrimination funny; Everett has done it, Paul Beatty did it beautifully in The Sellout, but very few have pulled it off like Yu does here.

Yu uses the device of the TV show as a metaphor for the immigrant experience, and there’s a layer here I know I can’t fully appreciate as someone who’s not Asian and whose parents were born and raised in the U.S. The idea of parents giving up something of themselves to try to make their kids’ lives better, and the kids striving to do better than their parents did in a system that doesn’t want to let them do so, come through in the depiction of the TV show that won’t even consider Asian-Americans as anything but background players.

There’s also a hazard in finding a credible way to conclude any story this inventive, something Everett hasn’t always done (The Trees comes to mind), but Yu pulls it off by both talking fast and switching venues for the big finish. The whole novel moves quickly, as Yu’s prose is light and there’s a lot of white space on the pages anyway, but once we get to the last two sections things start flying even with more exposition from Willis and Older Brother. I bought it, at least, and could see how Yu might map what happens in the book to some of the more positive stories of second-generation immigrants here. I can certainly see why this won the National Book Award in 2020 – it’s a tremendous book and one that says something important and new about American life.

(I haven’t seen the TV series adaptation, which premiered on Hulu a few months ago.)

Next up: Speaking of Percival Everett, I just finished his 2017 novel So Much Blue and am now on Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha.

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→ March 12, 2025
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Sing Sing.

Sing Sing has no business being as good as it is. This movie sounds like it’s going to have more sap than a pine forest, and instead of devolving into sentimental claptrap, it tells its story in an understated way that doesn’t try to tell the audience how to feel or what to expect. Of all of the movies I’ve seen from the 2024 cycle so far, it’s not the best movie or close to it, but it’s the one I’m going to recommend to the most people, because it should have very broad appeal, and has the second virtue of actually being good, even if it’s a little superficial in the telling. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story is set at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, and follows several incarcerated men who are participating in the prison’s Rehabiliation Through the Arts program, which holds workshops in several performing and writing arts in prisons across New York state. Divine G (Colman Domingo) is a fervent participant both as an actor and a playwright, and becomes the de facto leader of the acting troupe, which works with coach Brent Buell (Paul Raci) to stage productions every six months or so. The group’s dynamic is upset when another longtime inmate, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), joins the classes and brings a new perspective while also learning to deal with his own frustrations and anger, while also becoming frenemies with Divine G. The film follows the dance between the two men as they try to find ways to first work with and then help each other, all as the group works to put on a show and both men try to gain their freedom through a difficult legal process.

The story was co-written by Divine G and Maclin, along with the two screenwriters who eventually wrote the script, with all four listed when they received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. (It’s based on an Esquire story by John Richardson called “The Sing Sing Follies.”) Once you know that, it’s hard to see the film in any other light – this is a pretty remarkable piece of storycraft that gets at some real character development from both of the two leads, more than you find in many movies or even novels. Both Divine Eye and Divine G have clear story arcs, and the interplay between their characters and their characters’ stories is the beating heart of the film. Domingo’s superb as always, and more than deserved his Oscar nomination, but Maclin’s performance is excellent as well – even if he’s playing a version of himself.

The main problem with Sing Sing is that it’s almost too positive. The story focuses on the theater program and shows very little of prison life outside of it. There are some scenes in the prison yard that depict some illicit business, but that’s about all we get. The inmates in the theater program mostly seem to have significant freedom within the prison, even in how they dress, and the audience only hears about the struggles of incarceration, rather than seeing any of it. That’s part of why it’s a feel-good movie – you’ll feel good about how successful and meaningful the arts program is, and you won’t feel bad about how terrible it is to be locked up for years, even more so for a crime you didn’t commit. Prison just doesn’t look that bad in Sing Sing and I don’t think that’s accurate.

Nearly all of the cast here comprises formerly incarcerated men who came through the program; Domingo, Raci, and theater actor Sean San José are the only exceptions I see. Most are playing themselves, but it’s still remarkable how easy these performances are – there was never a point where it was clear that someone wasn’t a professional actor, even the many cameos (including the real Divine G, who appears early in the film as another inmate who asks Domingo for an autograph). It adds to the verisimilitude of the film, of course, but also underscores the point about the value of the program, which I interpreted as an argument for the value of many kinds of social-development programs for incarcerated people. These programs, like the one in Daughters as well, reduce recidivism, which is supposed to be the goal of most incarcerations (rather than punishment, or vengeance, which is what our carceral system is really about). We’re seeing men – there are almost no lines spoken by women in the film at all – who went through the RTA program, got out, and haven’t returned. Their very presence on the screen is a feel-good story. The script probably should have delved a little more into the horrors of life on the inside, but that would have been a very different movie, too. I’m flummoxed that this wasn’t a bigger hit – it only made about $2.5 million at the U.S. box office, coming out last summer, then returning to theaters when it started earning award nominations. Critics loved it, and loved Domingo’s performance. The ending is upbeat, but not saccharine. CODA was a critical success and Best Picture winner with less. I’m hoping Sing Sing finds its audience now that it’s streaming, because it deserved more than it got.

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