→ June 11, 2023
→ By

Demon Copperhead.

Barbara Kingsolver shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – the first time the honor was split among two books – for her novel Demon Copperhead, which shared the honor with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Demon Copperhead borrows its structure and characters from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the whole story to a poor mining county in the Appalachians, narrated by its title character from his early childhood to adulthood as the opioid crisis devastates his community, family, and his own life.

Demon is born to a single mother in Lee County, where the mining industry employed nearly everyone and then left them underemployed, injured, and increasingly addicted to painkillers. Demon, whose real name is Damon but acquired the nickname “Demon” early in life and had it stick, never knows any stability from the word go – his mother is a recovering addict, marries a local tough guy who terrorizes her and abuses Demon, only to have his mother die and his stepdad toss him out into the hands of social services. His path takes him through two foster homes, including the con-artist McCobbs, then to his estranged grandmother’s house, then back to Lee County and the high school football team, only to have a knee injury push him into the bottomless well of oxycontin. It’s a parade of tragedies interspersed with dark humor, leading towards eventual small triumphs, told by one of the most memorable narrator characters I’ve ever encountered.

If you know the bones of David Copperfield, from the book or perhaps from Armando Iannucci’s faithful 2020 film adaptation, then you’ll know the general plot outline of Demon Copperhead, as it adheres to the former book’s major story beats right to the end. Almost every character here has a clear analogue in the original – Demon is David, the McCobbs are the Micawbers, U-Haul is Uriah Heep, and so forth – that also provides the foundation for the modern versions, although they’re fleshed out enough to feel different from the originals. You could see U-Haul becoming Demon’s main antagonist early on, especially once you connect him to Uriah, but the way in which this plays out is different enough from the original to make it seem new.

This novel’s real strength is Demon, though. Kingsolver has given him a unique voice that combines the wisdom of his experiences through the story, the naïveté of his place of birth, and layers of empathy that appear at surprising times throughout the work. Kingsolver has used interesting narrative techniques before, as in The Poisonwood Bible, but here she does so with a single character who is thoroughly developed, who grows and learns throughout the novel, and whose flaws are right there on display even in his own telling. David Copperfield is someone you root for throughout Dickens’s novel because he’s so inherently good, and his travails are the result of encounters with terrible people and the extreme economic inequality of England in the early 1800s. Demon is more complex, making poor choices, sometimes to the point of treating people who care for him quite badly, even missing out on opportunities and lifelines. It’s a little harder to root for him, although ultimately I came down on that side, bearing in mind that it was clear where things were all going to end.

Dickens’s work was a social commentary on that inequality and the abysmal treatment of the poor, especially children, in his era, a theme he’d first covered in Oliver Twist and would return to many times in the later parts of his life. Kingsolver does the same here, with two focal points – the opioid epidemic and its main drivers in Purdue Pharmaceuticals; and the abandonment of rural people by nearly every stage of government, from counties and school districts up to the federal level. It’s not subtle by any means, and that’s been a criticism of the book, but I don’t know how you can be subtle about the harm that opioids have wreaked on these parts of the country. Kingsolver delivers the commentary in the most granular fashion, by showing the epidemic’s impact on individual characters and their families, most notably children neglected, abused, or left orphaned by those addicted, with scant discussion of policy questions or legal maneuvers. Purdue gets its mention, but mostly because Demon’s Aunt June briefly dates a guy who’s a sales rep for the company, and for the rest of the book they’re an offscreen villain, while every form of government is asleep at its respective wheel. It’s very Dickensian in a contemporary way, trading the workhouse for rehab, sharing its disdain for the central government’s failure to protect its most vulnerable charges.

It’s an arduous read because of all of the slings and arrows Demon suffers along the way, but Kingsolver does it more concisely than Dickens, and with such a compelling voice as the narrator that it’s both quicker than its page count would imply and more enjoyable than you’d think for a story where people do horrible things to each other and themselves. The adult Damon’s wry, wise telling of his own life is what truly powered me through the book so quickly. And with such a distinctly American plot and setting, it’s a worthy winner of the Pulitzer honor.

Next up: Susanna Hoffs, one of my favorite musicians of the 1980s and early 1990s, just released her first novel, This Bird Has Flown.

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→ May 26, 2023
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The Show.

The Show was doomed before it ever hit streaming. Scheduled for release in the fall of 2020, when theaters were closed, it has one of the least search-friendly titles you’ll find. The sort-of sequel to a little-seen collection of short films called Show Pieces, this full-length film was written by Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) and stars Tom Burke as a mysterious man on a mysterious quest that turns out to be far, far more mysterious than he or any of us expected. It’s weird and unbalanced and doesn’t tie everything up in a neat little bow, but it is a blast. You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.

Burke plays Fletcher Dennis, a man who travels under many pseudonyms and arrives in Northampton in search of a man named James Mitchum who, it turns out, died the night before Dennis’s arrival. Dennis is far more interested in an item that Mitchum was wearing than in the dead man himself, but his search for answers leads him to chat up a woman, Faith, who nearly died in the same hospital where Mitchum kicked it; hire a pair of preteen private investigators; talk to an amiably stupid bouncer from the nightclub where Mitchum was last seen; and eventually learn about a pair of long-dead comics who were one of the most popular acts in the UK for decades. While all this is happening, something is going on in his dreams and Faith’s, where both of them appear to be going to the same nightclub, and Dennis learns more about the item he’s searching for and the duplicitous man who’s hired him to do it.

The Show is wonderfully weird, trippy and madcap and clearly the work of a man unafraid to abide by normal plot conventions. It’s a movie better experienced than pondered, especially since several things don’t quite add up in the end – literally the end of the movie, for one – and others might make more sense if you’ve seen some of the related shorts in Show Pieces, which I have not. The film bounces gleefully across genres; when Dennis is talking to the two child detectives, the film goes black and white, and one of them narrates the action, out loud, to Dennis, as if he’s not there and it’s a noir film with a voice-over. (The two kids have the film’s best sight gag as well.) Fletcher himself is a nod to the British comic strip character Dennis the Menace, wearing the latter’s trademark jumper even though it’s an anachronism, with Burke playing the character with a perfect combination of guile and bemusement.

It’s also consistently funny, from great one-liners (“I see dead people.” Pause. “You work in a hospital.”) to running gags to visual humors and more. The dimwitted bouncer, Elton Carnaby, is the film’s best running joke; he can never seem to make up his mind – if his first answer to a question is “yes,” you can be fairly sure the actual answer is “no,” and he’ll get there eventually. Becky Cornelius (played by Ellie Bamber, who I think is going to be a huge star) lets a room to Dennis, and is about the most hilariously inept flirt you’ll ever come across. The gags don’t all land – the musician known as Herbert Sherbert, who dresses as a young Hitler, feels too obvious – but the sheer quantity of them and their placement all over the film, even in graphics and background shots (like the nod to Monty Python) make up for it. I’m pretty sure I’d catch even more of them if I watched the film a second time and paused to examine some of the flyers and newspaper headlines I didn’t see the first time through.

It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I could see a criticism that The Show isn’t really about anything – but that’s the nature of noir, or neo-noir, or perhaps we should just call this “hysterical noir” and stop with the labels? It’s just a fun story from a fertile, peripatetic mind. And I didn’t even mention Alan Moore’s own absolutely wonderful appearance in the second half of the film, with an utterly memorable hairstyle and a whole song and dance (okay, mostly song) number. I was hooked early on when it just seemed like a neo-noir film, but the sheer imagination of it all kept me on board till the ambiguous ending. Here’s hoping Moore gets to create the follow-up series he wants to make.

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→ May 9, 2023
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Return to Seoul.

Every year, I scan the list of films submitted by various countries for the Best International Feature Film award, looking for entries that are already available online when the list is complete around December, and then tracking the 15 films that make the annual shortlist. Some of those don’t become available until well after the Oscars, something I will never really understand since it seems like films like those lose the opportunity to cash in on the brief moment of added publicity. Cambodia’s submission this year, Return to Seoul, became available to rent digitally in mid-April, allowing me to catch up with it after it never played in a theater near me. The film, which is in French and Korean, made several critics’ lists of the ten best movies of 2022, and would have made my top ten as well. It’s an exceptionally well-done and moving look at a woman’s attempts to connect with her biological parents in South Korea, only to find that everything involved in the journey is more complicated than she anticipated. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

We meet Freddie (Park Ji-Min, a first-time actor) at four different points over about ten years, on separate trips she’s taken from France, where she went as an infant with her adoptive parents, to South Korea to try to locate and meet her biological parents. The first trip is an “accident,” or so she tells her parents, as her flight to Tokyo was cancelled, and she ends up connecting with some locals, one of whom speaks French. They go out on the town and eventually she learns from the French speaker that her only way to get information on her biological parents is go back to the Hammond Adoption Center, which arranged her adoption 25 years earlier. Her father is very interested in reconnecting with her, while her mother declines multiple requests from the adoption agency until she relents several years later. At first her father and his family want her to join them as if nothing happened, even suggesting she move to Korea to live with them, but even that relationship, where Freddie’s disinterest seems so clearcut, evolves in subtle and surprising ways.

Those two stories intertwine with Freddie’s own personal one, as we see her interacting with friends and struggling to find her own identity as someone who was visibly different from her adoptive family, yet doesn’t speak Korean and has no natural affinity to the place or culture of her birth. The script touches on themes of nature versus nurture, cultural alienation, and identity, without resorting to preaching or overly simplistic connections (such as blaming any of Freddie’s behavior on the fact that she’s adopted). It avoids easy explanations or pat resolutions, and neither parental storyline ends happily or unhappily – much is left ambiguous and it’s clear that there would be quite a bit left to both stories if the film had continued.

This is the second film by writer-director Davy Chou, after 2016’s Diamond Island, and he has said in interviews that he based this story on the life of a friend who was adopted from South Korea by French parents, as well as his own experiences as the child of a couple who fled Cambodia for France during the former’s civil war in the 1970s. He cast Park after meeting her through a friend, and she is a revelation here – it’s hard to believe this is her first professional acting role, as Freddie displays a gamut of emotions that all paper over a fundamental loneliness that defines her character. The emotional impact of the film, especially the scenes where Freddie meets her mother and some of her interactions with her father, depend almost entirely on Park’s portrayal, and she delivers with the right amount of emotion and expression. It’s a moving experience that leaves you wanting just a little bit more about Freddie, even as it ends on what seems like exactly the right note.

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→ April 27, 2023
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Living.

Living was the last English-language Oscar nominee on my list of movies to see, since I’m not interested in seeing Avatar and the only other nominees of note I haven’t seen are three of the International Feature picks. Scoring nominations this year for Best Actor (for Bill Nighy, his first) and Best Adapted Screenplay (for Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro), this adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s famed Ikiru is a quiet gem of a film, with a tour de force performance from its star and some lovely dialogue supporting him. It’s available to rent on amazon, iTunes, etc. (Full disclosure: I have never seen Ikiru.)

Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a widower and an aging bureaucrat in in the London County Council in the 1950s whose job seems to consist primarily of pushing paper around, especially when it can be pushed to another department on another floor. He never declines a request, merely passing the buck (or quid, I suppose) to someone else. His staff includes the young Miss Harris (Aimee Lee Wood), the lone woman in the group; the eager, brand-new employee Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp); and a few other replacement-level men who show no desire whatsoever to challenge the existing system.

This is all upended when Mr. Williams receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, with just months left to live, and finds himself terribly dissatisfied with his life. His son and daughter-in-law show little interest in him as a person, and he doesn’t seem to have any friends. He has no legacy to leave, no one who will truly miss him, so after vanishing from work for several days, he decides to take on one particular project that has been presented to his department and kicked around the building that he can see to fruition: turning a bombed-out building into a playground. His attempts to live a little also bring Miss Harris into the picture, as he takes her to lunch once or twice, and to a film, in an entirely chaste relationship that she can’t understand and that his daughter-in-law, with help from the neighborhood gossip, assumes is something more prurient. The film jumps ahead around the midpoint to show his funeral, after which we see flashbacks to the last few months of his life and the way his family and co-workers respond to his death. Their words and their behavior don’t exactly line up, although this might be the most authentic part of the entire script.

This is Bill Nighy’s film. I’ve always enjoyed his work, and argue just about every year that his story is the only remotely acceptable one in Love Actually, in large part because he treats the film with the reverence it deserves – none. He was outstanding in the British mini-series State of Play, and even charming in the ridiculous The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. This is the role of a lifetime, and he gives a performance to match it. His Mr. Williams is restrained, so constipated in speech that he’s hard to understand, but it makes the moments of actual emotion so much more powerful, even though he’s still actually kind of hard to understand. (Turn the volume up. Just a tip.) Nighy is often at his best in patrician roles, even though that’s not his upbringing, but here he gets a more consequential role in which to deploy that high-born air.

The script takes its time hitting its points, which appear to mirror those of the original film (based, I admit, on my reading of the latter’s Wikipedia entry), including a long, slow buildup to the doctor’s visit that defines the whole movie. That works because the dialogue is so precise – every word seems placed there for a specific purpose, especially those that come out of the mouth of Mr. Williams, yet these words never come across as forced, or out of character. Ishiguro is one of the greatest living prose writers, yet even across his novels, his voice changes to suit the style and genre of the work. Living is his work without sounding like his work, and the result is that Mr. Williams’ grief and revelations and enthusiasm for his one last project come through as genuine.

Nighy became an Oscar nominee at age 72, which Collider says puts him in the top ten for oldest such first-timers, forty-two years after his first credited film role. This is too un-showy of a role to win the honor – I’m surprised he even got the nomination, given how quiet and unpretentious he is as Mr. Williams – but he was certainly better than the fat-suit guy and the Elvis impersonator. Aimee Lee Wood, who is one of the stars of Sex Education, also gives a lovely turn in a smaller role as Miss Harris, serving as the unwitting confidante and comforter to Mr. Williams, while Alex Sharp, who bears more than a small resemblance to Matthew Murphy of the Wombats, is perfect as the wide-eyed innocent who hasn’t yet been ground down by the do-nothing mentality of the office. I’m not sorry to see Ishiguro lose out to Sarah Polley for her adapted screenplay of Women Talking, but both were quite deserving.

For those who are still curious about such things, I’ve got this in my revised top ten for 2022, at #9, just behind Tár and ahead of La Caja and Nope. I still have to see EO, Close, The Quiet Girl, and Return to Seoul, all of which are at least now out as rentals.

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→ April 19, 2023
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A Girl Returned.

Donatella di Pietrantonio’s 2019 novel A Girl Returned (L’Arminuta) was translated into English by Ann Goldstein, the translator for Elena Ferrante’s novels, which seemed like reason enough to read it. That, and it was only about 170 pages, so if it was terrible at least my investment was small. It’s pretty great, though, reminiscent of the better parts of Ferrante’s work in themes and setting.

The title refers to the narrator, who learns at the start of the novel that she’s going to go back to her biological parents, people she doesn’t know at all because she’s been raised since birth by a distant cousin. That cousin was married but childless, so the couple adopted the narrator from her relatively poor parents, who also had a whole mess of children they couldn’t necessarily afford to feed. She gets very little explanation of why she’s going back, but her adoptive mother has taken to her bed and shown signs of illness, so the narrator thinks her mother might have sent her away while recovering, or might even be dying. It’s a shock to her system on multiple levels, as she moves from an affluent life with the people she thought were her real parents to a much less privileged life with people she doesn’t know and who are less educated and cultured than the cousins who reared her. As the novel progresses, we follow her attempts to navigate her new life, including having siblings for the first time, while she also gradually learns more of the truth about both of her families.

There’s a sparseness to A Girl Returned that emphasizes the narrator’s desolation. The prose and the descriptions therein both have the dulled colors of television and films from the 1970s, which also seems to telegraph the hazy nature of every adult’s memories of their teenaged years. Di Pietrantonio captures that feeling of helplessness from the age when you’re old enough to recognize the power of autonomy, but not quite old enough to get it. She’s completely trapped, with brothers who bully her and steal her food, with a mother who appears to have no affection for her, with a father who’s barely there, and with the teenager’s inability to see beyond the next few months. In her case, the light at the end of the tunnel is closer than she realizes, as she’s going to get a chance to move away to attend secondary school before the novel is out, but the combination of the change in circumstances and environments is so dramatic that she can’t see her way out of it.

The twists and turns that come the narrator’s way in this slim novel mean that she never has time to wallow in her misery, at least not on the page, before something else happens, good or bad. It’s all plausible, but the story is condensed enough to keep the novel moving well, even in the most introspective parts where the narrator is pondering how she ended up in this situation.

The result is a coming-of-age story in miniature, taking just a small amount of time, a bit more than a year in the narrator’s life, where a significant number of things ends up happening to her. It’s oddly lovely for a story that’s certainly not a happy one, posing huge questions about identity and family, even as simple as what it really means to be a mother – or what it means to be part of a family. The narrator keeps talking about her two mothers, as if she’s uncertain what to call either of them. The novel offers no answers, simply ending the way a memory does. It’s substantial for a novel so slim, enough to leave you wanting more.

Next up: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. I’ve never read it, or seen the movie, in fact.

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→ April 14, 2023
→ By

The Hero of this Book.

Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway was my favorite novel of 2019, an intoxicatingly humanist novel that loved its characters in all their eccentricities. The Hero of this Book is her newest novel, her first since then, a brief but dazzling work of autofiction – a charge the narrator denies – as McCracken uses her gift to grapple with her grief after the death of her mother.

The narrator is McCracken, or it isn’t, or most likely it’s both, and she takes pains to convince us both ways, but regardless, her mother has died, and she has gone to London to revisit some of the places she’d been with her mother, and some new places, as she remembers her mother’s life and deals with her own grief. The narrator’s mother was a fascinating woman in the retelling, coming in just a shade under five feet tall, facing physical difficulties through just about her entire life, marrying a difficult man, and, as far as I can tell, getting her money’s worth out of life even with everything it threw at her. She sounds like a real kick.

The trip through London, which all takes place in a single day within the book, is part framing device but also parallels the peripatetic nature of memory, especially how your memories of a parent may span decades (if everyone involved is so fortunate). The narrator walks around London, Joyce-like, while dancing back and forth between the present and her memories of her mother, the way a painter might move around a canvas without apparent purpose, only for a complete picture to emerge once the painting is nearly finished. Her mother appears to have been an extremely interesting person, a Jewish woman raised in Iowa with a twin sister, often confused for someone from all manner of ‘exotic’ origins due in part to her vantablack hair. The portrait of her mother arises as an accumulation of these details, how she looked, how she walked, things she liked, things of which she didn’t approve. Her mother liked cats. She told the cats she loved them. She almost never told her daughter that. You should already feel the outlines of the character forming just from those three sentences. It’s a clinic on character development – and McCracken, who teaches writing at the University of Texas-Austin, throws in many little notes on how to write better characters, as well as other tips for the would-be author, even after telling readers not to trust any writer who does such a thing. (She also offers this wonderful, pithy quote that I haven’t been able to stop pondering since I read the book: “An unpublished book is an ungrounded wire.”)

McCracken’s own mother hated memoirs as well, and the author had promised her mum that she’d never turn her into a character in one of her books, so what exactly The Hero of this Book is remains an unanswered question. It’s fiction, so it can’t be a memoir; the details of the narrator’s mother adhere so much to the details of the author’s mother that, well, isn’t it a memoir? “A narrative composed from personal experience,” sayeth Merriam-Webster, which, if not the authority on the meanings of words, is certainly an authority, and the one with the best Twitter account. Then this book is a memoir. I prefer the term “autofiction,” although the narrator here not only rejects the term, but salts the soil beneath it with her scorn, saying it sounds like something a robot would write – if only she knew that ChatGPT was coming. Or perhaps she did. It wouldn’t surprise me.

That elusive quality is The Hero of this Book’s strongest feature – it is brief, and yet it manages to confound you in a delightful way. It doesn’t try to bounce between genres, but exists between them, occupying spaces you didn’t realize existed. With McCracken’s lovely prose, which once again shines with wit and heart (“I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life”), it’s a delight from start to finish. I have no idea what’s even in the running for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which will be announced in about three weeks, but I’ll be pulling for this one to win.

Next up: Percival Everett’s Dr. No, itself a Pulitzer candidate and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award last month.

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→ April 9, 2023
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The Trees.

Percival Everett has been publishing novels since the mid-1980s, but the 66-year-old author has come into much greater critical acclaim with his three most recent works, becoming a Pulitzer finalist for 2021’s Telephone, a Booker finalist for 2022’s The Trees, and, so far, already a finalist for the NBCC Fiction award for Dr. No. I’d never read any of his work before The Trees, which I read on my flight to Phoenix and enjoyed so much that I went to Changing Hands that same day and bought Dr. No. The Trees is a massive fake-out of a novel, starting out as a bawdy, neo-noir sort of detective novel, before taking a sudden turn into more serious and philosophical territory, resolving the question of the crime in the least satisfying way possible – because that was never the point.

A couple of white men are found brutally murdered in the minuscule, backwards town of Money, Mississippi, a town only known for being the site of the murder of Emmett Till. In each case, they’ve been castrated, with their genitalia in the fist of a Black man’s corpse found in the same room. And each time, it’s the same Black man’s corpse. It goes from the morgue to the next murder scene, making a mockery of the local authorities, who did not need the help. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations show up to try to solve the murders, which doesn’t go over well with the white cops in Money or even the victims’ families, although the assistance the two receive from some of the Black residents is only slightly better. The victims turn out to have a surprising connection, and just as the MBI agents and the FBI agent assigned to help them have started to put this together, reports come in of nearly identical crimes in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

The Trees is part dark comedy, part revenge fantasy, part detective story (at least at the start), but it is entirely a story about the weight of history. The systemic racism that pervades the entire history of the United States is reflected in the murders, the authorities, the investigation, almost every aspect of The Trees. It’s in the banter – much of it very, very funny – between the two MBI agents, who absolutely could have stepped out of The Wire. It’s in the diner where Gertrude, a fair-skinned woman who lives in Money, works as a waitress, often serving white people who conveniently forget that she’s Black. It’s practically woven into the pages of the book.

While the novel doesn’t have the same psychological horror element as Get Out, it mines very similar thematic territory, combining it with the sort of over-the-top humor that made Paul Beatty’s The Sellout such a critical success. There’s a seething rage beneath the surface here that Everett holds in check with the various layers of humor, especially with the MBI agents Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, who combine the “old married couple” vibe of McNulty and Bunk with wry commentary on the dangers of their situation as two Black feds in a town that has is still debating whether to acknowledge the advent of Reconstruction. (These two characters could have their own TV series, although doing so would strip out the theme of historical racism that underlies the novel, and I think the novel is unfilmable given its somewhat ambiguous ending.) It’s a delicate balance to strike, and Everett never seems to waver, mixing in humor highbrow and low, even throwing in some ridiculous character names like Cad Fondle or Herberta Hind, to allow him to escalate the extent and violence of the crimes at the narrative’s heart without turning the reader away.

Where The Trees ends may frustrate you if you need a firm conclusion that wraps up all of a novel’s loose ends, as Everett does very little of that. You’ll know who’s responsible for the murders, but beyond that, he offers little resolution and far more doubt than is conventional for any novel, let alone one that at least draws on the traditions of the detective genre. It’s in service of the book’s larger themes of historical racism and the double-edged sword of vengeance. Your mileage may vary, of course. I found myself so drawn in by the humor and the tight prose that I was willing to follow The Trees wherever it led me.

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of this Book.

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→ March 8, 2023
→ By

Broker.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters was my #3 film of that year, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, depicting a cobbled-together family of thieves who come together because the world beyond hasn’t provided them with the structure they desire. It’s a simple story where nothing substantial happens, deriving its huge emotional power from small interactions and gradual revelations about the five core characters.

Kore-eda’s most recent film, Broker, is his first Korean-language movie, and stars Song Kang-ho of Parasite as one of two baby ‘brokers’ who sell abandoned babies, illegally, to couples looking to adopt. It shares a core theme with Shoplifters, as we see five people come together to form another would-be family, one even closer to the dynamic of a biological family, but does so with more plot and more suspense than Shoplifters, counteracting the familiarity of the earlier film. (You can rent Broker on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Song plays Ha Sang-Hyeon, owner of a laundry business who also volunteers at a church where there’s a baby box, a place where anyone can leave a baby they wish to give up for adoption. He and his friend Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) steal some of these babies to sell them on the black market for a few thousand dollars, which they also justify to themselves as saving the babies from going to an orphanage. This all goes awry when one mother, Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun, a K-pop singer who records as IU), comes back after abandoning her baby, and ends up accompanying the two men on their visits to would-be buyers. They’re pursued by two policewomen, Detectives Lee and Soo-jin, who have been trying to catch the baby brokers in the act of selling a child so they can arrest the two men, although it turns out that Soo-jin (Bae Doona) has additional motives for her ardor in this search.

The brilliance of both of these Kore-eda films lies in the telling, in the dialogue and the small moments and the way his characters reveal themselves through their interactions with each other and the world around them. All three of the main characters have elements in their histories that we learn as the film progresses that further explain their motivations, but more importantly just reveal more about who they are. The script is smarter than just connecting A to B, than saying that one character does something specific because some other thing happened in their past; it uses those past events to provide depth and definition to all three of the main characters, and even to a couple of the secondary characters as well.

Song earned the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2022 for his work in Broker, becoming the first Korean actor to win the honor there, continuing the rise in global acclaim that began with his work in Parasite, although he already had a few cases’ worth of honors in South Korea and elsewhere in Asia going back a quarter of a century. He’s the core of this transient family, and his understated performance in Broker gives the film the anchor that allows some of the other actors to go bigger with their individual characters. This is just Lee Ji-eun’s second major film role, and she’s a revelation – I doubt anyone would guess she was a singer by trade from watching her nuanced, affecting performance as a mother who has her reasons for wishing to give up her baby but is also determined to see him go to the right family. Just about every character here is damaged in some way, but none of the performances, even the side ones, are showy or loud.

I adored Shoplifters, and I think that colored my experience with Broker. Both revolve around makeshift families, and both understand that families can be what we make of them. Many people do not have the privilege of strong biological ties, of two parents or siblings or extended relations who are present in their lives, but both of these films explore the ways in which some people forge those relationships on their own – perhaps unwittingly, because we need that sort of connection in our lives. Broker is an excellent film, and is different enough from Shoplifters thanks to some of the suspense in the second half to stand on its own, but I also think I loved it a little less because it treads some ground familiar to me from the earlier film.

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→ March 1, 2023
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Shehan Karunatilaka won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a fascinating work of magical realism that might as well be called Maali Almeida in the Bardo, as its protagonist is dead from the moment the book begins. Set in Sri Lanka in 1989, in the early years of what would be a 36-year civil war between the governing Sinhalese majority and Tamil rebels, the book follows the title character, a photographer who took many photos of victims of the war, through his seven days (moons) in purgatory as he tries to figure out who killed him and how.

Maali Almeida is dead, and finds himself in a bureaucratic afterlife where multiple entities try to coax him into different directions, one of which is “the Light” and promises some sort of salvation, while another might give him the chance to communicate with the living to try to direct them to solve the mystery of his death by retrieving an important set of incriminating photographs he’s hidden. One possible explanation is that his work for a shadowy non-governmental organization or his freelance work for the AP and other journalistic outlets covering atrocities committed by both sides during the war. Almeida photographed corpses, but also murders and murderers, and any number of people might have wanted him dead.

Almeida was also gay in a society that was not particularly hospitable to gay people, although in his tales of his life there were closeted gay men all over Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka). He lived with two friends, Jaki, who was supposed to be his girlfriend; and Dilan, known as DD, who was one of those closeted men and becomes Maali’s lover, although the photographer is serially unfaithful to him. DD’s father is the powerful businessman and politician Stanley, who would strongly prefer that his son not be gay and join his business rather than working for an environmental activist group, and who is emblematic of the byzantine connections across Sri Lankan society at the time, where even the “good” guys could be tied to one side of the civil war or the other.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a richly layered novel that explores themes beyond just that of the civil war, which ended in 2009 with the defeat of the main Tamil rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the death of their leader. Maali is a complicated protagonist, part hero and part anti-hero, a drunk, a philanderer, a degenerate gambler, an atheist, and more. He professed to just taking photographs as a job, although of course he took photographs as a hobby as well; he’s not explicitly political, but hoped to take pictures that could end wars and bloodshed. His multifaceted character opens up all kinds of thematic possibilities, from discrimination to morality to how we cope with our own mortality, and Karunatilaka explores all of these, some more successfully than others.

Of course, because of the photographs Maali took, the authorities become very keen to find this missing stash – more keen than they are to find out who killed him, even with pressure from his family, from Jaki and DD, even from Stanley at one point. This creates two parallel narratives and a real sense of time pressure, as Maali tries to direct his friends to get to the photographs so they can expose the atrocities of both sides, while the authorities are trying to get the photos for themselves, and there’s an inherent tension from the question of who’ll get to the photos first – or whether the authorities will get to Jaki and DD before anyone finds the cache. There’s also the clock of the seven moons, referring to seven days before which Maali must decide whether he’s going to move into the Light or follow one of the other shades offering a different experience in the afterlife.

Karunatilaka seems to be well-versed in the history of this sort of political satire with elements of magical realism, from The Master and Margarita to One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel isn’t at the level of those two masterpieces, but it’s an heir to their legacy, drawing heavily on the former’s sense of the absurd and fantastical, and on the latter’s sense of outrage, especially outrage at the lack of outrage. Both of those earlier novels targeted authoritarian regimes that would torture and disappear opponents, which is exactly what the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka did during the civil war. So much of this novel takes place in the afterworld – an especially ridiculous one, with bureaucrats, flunkies, and talking leopards – that it shields the reader from some of the worst horrors of the civil war, allowing Karunatilaka to push forward with a narrative that might otherwise have been unreadable.

I haven’t read any of the other longlisted novels for last year’s Booker Prize, although Percival Everett’s The Trees is on my to-read shelf right now. As Booker winners go, though, this is one of the better ones among the 40 I’ve read, and I hope it signals a return to the peak the prize had from 2008 to 2018, with just one dud in those eleven years and several of my all-time favorite novels winning during the span.

Next up: Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, losing to Damon Galgut’s The Promise.

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→ February 28, 2023
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Nope.

Nope is the third feature film from writer-director Jordan Peele, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the outstanding Get Out, which was a biting satire wrapped in a smart horror film. For some reason, the studio behind Nope tried to pitch it more as another horror film, but that’s not just underselling it, but also probably misrepresented it. This is much more of a sci-fi mystery with a surprising moral to it, another smart film from Peele but in a completely different vein from his debut. (I haven’t seen Us, his second film.) You can stream Nope on Peacock or rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the siblings OJ and Em Haywood, who run a horse farm where they train the animals for roles in film and television. As Nope begins, their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), is killed by metal debris that falls from the sky, with a nickel impaling him in the eye and a key embedded itself in the horse he was riding. They assume these fell from an airplane and eventually they try to pick up more business, but when they find it’s lagging, OJ sells some of his horses to the nearby western theme park Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star whose TV series ended in tragedy when the chimp who starred on the show became violent to several of the cast members – but not to Jupe. When the electricity starts going off on the Haywoods’ farm without explanation, and the horses start reacting badly to some unseen force, the siblings decide to invest in some high-tech cameras to try to figure out what’s going on.

Nope is a slow burn, similar to Get Out, but not quite the same – where Peele’s first film was sinister until the big reveal, this one unfurls its mystery by degrees, with more misdirection that allows you to experience the perspectives of multiple characters. It was also easier to figure out what was happening in Get Out, or at least get the sense, than what’s happening in Nope. The obvious answer would be that it’s a UFO, which, of course, most of the characters think is the answer, including the Fry’s Electronics employee Angel (Brandon Perea), who realizes from the start that something weird is happening out at the ranch and invites himself to be a part of the investigation. What they find is much more interesting on a literal level and a thematic one.

The cast is fantastic across the board. Kaluuya has never missed for me, right down to his pre-fame appearance on Doctor Who (where we get to hear his British accent for once). The steely reserve that made him so menacing in Widows here works in a different direction, as his character is so tightly wound that he feels like he’s about to combust. Yeun probably needed more to do, but he’s excellent, as always, as a huckster and entrepreneur trying to squeeze every dollar he can out of the limited assets he has. Perea is a scene-stealer in a comic relief character that’s actually well conceived and well written – he’s hilarious, but also plays important roles in the plot and helps illuminate the relationship between the siblings and also later provide some connection to a fourth character who helps them try to unravel the ultimate mystery. If there’d been any awards attention for this movie, he would have been worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, as well as a potential Original Screenplay nod for Peele. Wrenn Schmidt is a little wasted as Jupe’s wife, while Barbie Ferreira is even more wasted in a cameo as Angel’s co-worker, but I did enjoy the cameo from ‘80s prime-time soap star Donna Mills.

There’s one overarching theme to the story here that I might spoil by discussing, so if you haven’t seen Nope and intend to, you may wish to stop reading. The throughline that connects Jupe and the Haywoods is the use of animals for entertainment, with the implication that how we treat these animals in turn affects how they will treat us, or even what sort of animals they will become over time. OJ shows respect for their horses, and when he’s trying to show one horse, Lucky, for a commercial, he bristles at any suggestion from the director that might distress the animal, even telling a crew member not to make eye contact with Lucky for fear it will upset him. While we don’t see Jupe’s chimpanzee colleague being openly mistreated, the flashbacks – the one bit of the film where there’s some actual violence on screen – strongly imply that the chimp was being exploited, and that his rampage was the result of this treatment. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole about this, several critics and writers have noted that this subplot mirrors the actual story of Travis the chimp, who was separated from his mother at three days old and sold to a couple who kept him as a pet, only to have him turn violent one day, mauling and disfiguring a family friend.) All of this comes together in the film’s resolution, which also features some spectacular visual effects, to make it clear that the story is at least trying to make us realize the extent to which we are exploiting other creatures – and perhaps, on some level, other people – for no purpose beyond our entertainment. The characters who don’t understand this end up dead; the others survive. I don’t think you could make the moral much clearer than that.

Right now, I have Nope in my top ten for the year, although it could end up pushed out as I see more foreign-language films, since several of the most acclaimed non-English language movies, including two Oscar nominees, still aren’t available digitally as of February 27th. (Here’s hoping I wake up to find The Quiet Girl is rentable.) Regardless of its exact ranking for me whenever I wrap this cycle, Nope is excellent, another cerebral, thoughtful undertaking from Peele, even if it’s not quite up to the high bar he set for himself with Get Out.

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