→ June 10, 2021
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How Lucky.

As a general rule, I don’t review books by people I know. For one thing, I know a lot of people who write books. I’m a writer, and I wrote some books, and either of those things would probably put me in contact with lots of people who also write books. And life beyond that has also put me in contacts with people who write books. Sometimes people I didn’t know were writing books write books. There are a lot of books in my world. It’s a good thing I like to read.

Anyway, I’m going to break my own rule for a moment – not the first time, I think, but it’s rare – to talk about Will Leitch’s novel How Lucky. Will’s a longtime friend, and someone whose work I enjoy. He’s also one of the most prolific writers around, and when I see his newsletter come in on Saturday, I just can’t get over how many words he writes each week. I would never tell you that writing is hard for me, but I feel like an absolute sluggard compared to Will.

How Lucky is fabulous. It’s not what it seems to be, at first, and I wonder how well the book world will appreciate it for what it truly is – a character study of the highest order, full of empathy, insight, and humor. There’s a Rear Window-ish mystery here, and Will does a fine job executing that plot without resorting to too many clichés, and when the main character is in danger (as he must be, at some point, because the conventions of the genre say so), it doesn’t last too long. There are also some fun side characters who add a lot of humor in addition to giving the protagonist some sort of foils against whom he can work. But this is about Daniel, the narrator, the star, and eventually, the hero.

Daniel works from home, handling some social media work for a fictional, regional airline in the southeast, which means he’s extra busy on college football game days. He also has spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic, progressive disease that has him using a wheelchair and unable to speak without the aid of a speech-generating device. He lives in Athens, Georgia, and gets help a few times a day from a home health worker named Marjani, as well as frequent visits from Travis, Daniel’s best friend since childhood, a sort of lovable stoner right out of Inherent Vice.

Daniel’s days have a predictable routine, and over the few weeks right before the novel starts, he sees a University of Georgia student, whom we later learn is a recent arrival from China named Ai Chin, several mornings at the same time as she’s walking and he’s on his front porch. One morning, however, she gets into a tan Camaro Daniel hasn’t seen before, and within a day, there are reports that she’s gone missing, and Daniel suspects that he saw her abductor. The story becomes a little less straightforward than that as it moves along, but that is all secondary to what we get from Daniel. The mystery exists in service to the main character, to give Leitch more room to expand on Daniel’s personality and thoughts on his life in a body that is betraying him a hell of a lot faster than the rest of our bodies are betraying us.

The conceit that Daniel, despite being what most people would probably consider unlucky to an extreme degree, doesn’t see himself that way is central to the book. Will mentions in the acknowledgements (where, full disclosure, I am also mentioned) that he and his family are close with a family in Athens whose son was born with SMA as well, which introduced him to the community of families dealing with this disease. SMA is progressive, and degenerative, so while the life expectancy of children born with it has increased substantially over the last few decades, notably since the approval of a drug called Spinraza in December of 2016, it is ultimately terminal, and people with SMA see a faster decline in their quality of life as the motor neurons in the spinal cord shrink and lose function. I can’t speak for anyone with SMA, or even as a family member of someone with it or a similar disease (like ALS), but I didn’t find Will’s portrayal of Daniel here to be facile, or overly optimistic. Daniel strikes me as a realist, just a life-positive one. He’s not denying what’s happening, or what’s in front of him. He’s just determined to make the best of it, and appreciative of what the world – especially his mom, Travis, and Marjani – has given him. He combines that with some dry wit that, because I know the author and have listened to lots of his podcasts as well as read quite a lot of his work, is very much Will’s, and I heard much of Daniel’s inner monologue in Will’s voice.

I tore through How Lucky in just three days, even though I was pretty sure how the plot itself was going to conclude – not down to the details, of course, but in general, there are a limited number of ways Leitch could end this book, and one in particular that made the most sense given the rest of the novel. I just couldn’t get enough of Daniel’s character. Will has created a memorable, likeable protagonist whose voice is unique and who stands out especially today in the era of the antihero. I’ve seen comparisons of Daniel to all sorts of main characters from literary history, but he reminded me quite a bit of one of my own favorites, Miles Vorkosigan, the hero of Lois McMaster Bujold’s series of sci-fi adventure novels, himself born with a genetic disease that limited his growth and left him with brittle bones. Miles’ novels all work pretty much the same way: He throws himself into ridiculous situations, often with insufficient regard for his own well-being, and uses his brains to work his way out of trouble. It’s formulaic, but a formula I can’t help enjoying. Daniel is more well-rounded, and as the narrator, he gives us far more insight into his personality than Bujold gives us into Miles over multiple novels, but they share the same general outlook on life, and while Miles never says it explicitly, I think he’d echo Daniel’s view. We are all just lucky to be alive, and to experience the world with each other is one of life’s greatest gifts.

Next up: I’ve just finished Nella Larsen’s Passing, a film adaptation of which will appear on Netflix later this year.

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→ June 4, 2021
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The Vanishing Half.

Brit Bennett has popped up as a favorite to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, to be announced next Friday, June 11th, for her second novel, The Vanishing Half, which HBO is already planning to adapt into a limited series. It is a fascinating work about “passing,” where lighter-skinned Black people pass as white (itself the subject of a novel, Nella Larsen’s Passing, that will appear on the big screen later this year), but with multiple dimensions of intersectionality as well, exploring what happens when two twins take divergent paths because one passes and the other does not.

Desiree and Stella Vignes are identical twins who live in a peculiar town outside of New Orleans called Mallard, a Black enclave where all the residents have relatively light skin – to the point that Mallard looks down on Black people with darker skin tones in many of the ways that you might associate with subtle white racism, even though Mallard residents themselves face racism subtle and unsubtle from white people from surrounding towns. That touches the girls’ lives when they’re seven years old and white men lynch their father as they watch, hiding with their mother, the devastation of which leads indirectly to their decision to run away from home as teenagers. They move to New Orleans, barely able to take care of themselves at first, but eventually settle into menial jobs, one of which comes to Stella because she can pass as a white woman, and the hiring person doesn’t even consider that she might be Black. Stella becomes the vanishing twin of the book’s title, leaving New Orleans without giving her sister any warning, leaving no trace of herself and cutting off any contact with her remaining family. The novel traces their two paths, and how each has one child, a daughter, the two of whom will eventually come into coincidental contact in California, forcing both Vignes sisters to confront their pasts, both shared and separate.

For a novel that isn’t very long – 343 pages, and a brief read for that length – The Vanishing Half has a lot to unpack, starting, of course, with its core examination of race and identity. Race is a social construct, and Bennett uses that as a launching point for the very unparallel lives first of the Vignes sisters, who find themselves in very different circumstances as they move into adulthood, and then their daughters, two cousins who come back together as if driven there by fate. (How Desiree’s daughter, Jude, first encounters and recognizes the aunt she’d never met requires some suspension of disbelief.) The interplay between race, identity – can you be who you are if you shed the race society first thrust upon you? – and later social status is the clear strength of the book, but it becomes muddled in places as Bennett’s approach becomes more intersectional, bringing in additional characters who are well-developed for secondary players but who aren’t additive to the main story. The narrative is more potent when she’s using the two sisters’ stories to explore different aspects of race and racism in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, which seems like the most likely argument for this book to win the Pulitzer.

Of the two main characters, Desiree seems the more developed, although there might be some primacy bias at work there – we get a few chapters of her story before we meet Stella at all. It’s also likely that Bennett left Stella more inscrutable by design, the “star” who is always just far enough away to remain somewhat impossible to truly know. Desiree’s daughter, Jude, shares a name with the Biblical figure who wrote about how God would punish false prophets, those who preached in his name without his truth, imploring the faithful to stand up for their beliefs – which she does, pursuing Stella and Stella’s daughter Kennedy with the tenacity of a true believer. As the twins fade into the background, it’s Jude who emerges as the novel’s most complete and compelling character, dealing with the consequences of both sisters’ choices in life, and a society that imposes such a cost on Blackness that her aunt chose passing – and giving up her sister, her mother, and her own identity – rather than continue to pay.

Next up: My friend Will Leitch’s first novel, How Lucky.

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→ June 1, 2021
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The Ardent Swarm.

Tunisian author Yamen Manai’s slim fable The Ardent Swarm first appeared in the U.S. this February to wide acclaim, as the longtime novelist’s work hadn’t appeared in English before. Set in an unnamed country that bears a strong resemblance to Tunisia in the wake of the overthrow of the dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the story follows the humble beekeeper Sidi, who sees one of his colonies of bees (whom he calls his “girls”) ravaged by what we all now know as murder hornets – Vespa mandarinia, the Asian giant hornet, which preys on honeybees. When he discovers the cause of the collapse of his colonies, two of his friends offer to fly to Japan to gather queen bees of the Apis cerana japonica subspecies, the only honeybee with a known defense mechanism against the murder hornets: the “ardent swarm,” where the honeybee workers surround the invader, exhale more carbon dioxide, and beat their wings furiously to raise the temperature up near 50 Celsius, cooking the hornet to death.

In Manai’s novel, the dictator, just referred to as Handsome One, has been deposed just as Ben-Ali was.  In the wake of his overthrow, various factions are competing for power, including the military and a radical Islamist group called The Party of God that tries to buy votes by distributing free food to rural villagers – a more extreme depiction of the Islamist party Ennahda, which won the most seats in the first parliamentary elections after Ben-Ali’s ouster, although secularist parties took power in subsequent elections. Sidi resists the The Party of God’s inducements, only to discover that they bear responsibility for the deaths of his “girls,” forcing him to make a choice that stands as a metaphor for the choice that faced Tunisia – and that other countries faced in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, often choosing less wisely than the Tunisians did.

The Ardent Swarm is an obvious parable, with obvious parallels to the Arab Spring while also serving as a lament and a warning over our cavalier relationship to our environment, and how fragile the ecosystem on which our species depends can be. We depend on these pollinators, including domesticated honeybees and wild bumblebees, to maintain our food supply, but a combination of stressors from parasites (notably the Verroa mite), habitat loss, and pesticides appears to be contributing to the decline of domestic stocks in North America and Europe. Minai ties the corruption of the Party of God to a breakdown in this historical relationship between humans and the land, short-circuiting it in a way that will leave people dependent on their government for basic needs – and thus more compliant to its demands – if they can’t, or forget how to, take care of themselves. Sidi stands nearly alone in his resistance to this pressure, and faces extremely difficult odds when trying to resurrect his colonies, an effort obstructed by further corruption by Islamist authorities in the government and in the university where one of his allies works.

A cynical take on The Ardent Swarm might compare it to the over-the-top fables of Paolo Coelho, which are well-written but simplistic. I saw this more as a modern and less oblique twist on the short novels of Italo Calvino, one of the greatest fabulists in literary history, an author very concerned with the relation between person and place. There’s wit here that reminded me more of Calvino, or even a little of Murakami, but with the seriousness of the French satirists of the mid-20th century. The Ardent Swarm is a plea, for democracy, for our environment, and for a different future than the one towards which we’re heading. It deserves a wider audience.

Next up: Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, one of the favorites to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when that award is announced next Friday.

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→ May 7, 2021
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Minari.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Nomadland

2. The Father

3. A Sun

4. Minari

5. Promising Young Woman

6. Wolfwalkers

7. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

8. Judas and the Black Messiah

9. A Personal History of David Copperfield

10. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

11. Collective

12. The Nest

13. Boys State

14. Palm Springs

15. One Night in Miami

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→ May 4, 2021
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The Martian.

So, I haven’t actually seen the movie The Martian, because I told myself I really wanted to read the book first, and 2015 was one of my in-between years when I didn’t see all the Oscar nominees. (I did see Spotlight, all five animated nominees, Ex Machina, and The Force Awakens, and nothing else from that year until we watched What Happened, Miss Simone? last year during the lockdown.) And then … I never read the book, until a few weeks ago, when I got the book on sale as an e-book, and I actually read the book. I suppose now I should see the movie, because the book, while flawed, is pretty good.

The book, which came out in 2011, is a perfect exemplar of hard science fiction: Author Andy Weir spends a significant portion of the text getting the science right, but it is mostly in service of the greater story. Mark Watney is one of the astronauts on a manned mission to Mars, and a series of accidents on the surface, spurred by a massive dust storm, has Watney left on the surface, presumed dead, while the ship takes off without him. Of course, he’s very alive, and has to find a way to survive until the next manned mission arrives – and get himself to that site – or, possibly, communicate with NASA to let them know he’s still alive. Eventually (mild spoiler), NASA figures it out, and they arrange a rescue mission that captivates the world.

There’s a lot of technical detail in The Martian, especially for a novel aimed at a popular audience, enough to give me some bad Red Mars memories, but Weir manages to keep those details from bogging down the text too much by putting all of those specifications in Watney’s voice. The narrative settles quickly into a rhythm where Watney conceives a plan, goes through the details (for the reader), and then executes it. Some plans work, some don’t, and in the latter case we do the whole thing over again. It only works, though, because Watney is a smart-ass, with plenty of the smart and, especially once he starts communicating with others, plenty of the ass, too.

What works a little less well, however, is the way that Weir throws one obstacle after another in Watney’s way, which might work in some contexts but here does become repetitive, in a “not again” sense – just when it appears that he’s on a path that might lead him to a rescue, even though you know even that will still be arduous and difficult, Weir pulls the threadbare rug out from under his main character. Later in the book, after Watney has reestablished a bare minimum of communication with NASA, which helps the text tremendously – there is no actual dialogue involving the book’s protagonist until that point, since he is, obviously, alone on a whole planet – Weir cuts it off. It’s not that the rescue thus becomes more difficult and unlikely; it’s that the text benefited so much from having Watney involved in even limited dialogue with another human.

In the end, though, it works, because Weir has created a great lead character in Watney, and that carries the story – not the technical details, as accurate as they may be. (There’s a bit of a Terraforming Mars vibe, here, although that game was directly inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.) Watney is a wiseass, and the wit helps balance out the dry (pun intended) details for the long stretches where it’s just him, alone, trying to figure out how to survive long enough to get to the next step, and maybe keep himself alive until the next planned manned mission arrives on Mars. I don’t think The Martian is for everyone, but if you can hang with the technical stuff, there’s a smart, occasionally fun Robinson Crusoe-in-space story here that I enjoyed quite a bit.

Next up: I’m reading an advance copy of Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, which comes out on May 18th.

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→ April 22, 2021
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A Sun.

The gripping Taiwanese neo-noir film A Sun mostly escaped critical notice in 2020 after hitting Netflix last January, only coming to broader attention when Variety critic Peter Debruge named it the best film of 2020. Even now, it has just 15 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, only three from major U.S.-based outlets, despite making the short list for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It should have advanced to the final five, because it’s one of the best films I’ve seen from 2020, wrapping a 21st century crime drama and a story of family tragedy ripped out of 19th century Brit Lit together in a strange and totally compelling picture.

A Sun starts out with a shocking scene, as we see two teenage boys heading through the kitchens of a large restaurant into the dining room, where one of them approaches another teenager at a table, takes a machete, and hacks off the victim’s hand, leaving him screaming and covered with blood on the floor. The reasons for this won’t become apparent for some time, but we learn that Chen Jian Ho, called A-Ho throughout the film, is one of the two attackers, along with his friend Radish, and claims at the trial that he thought they were only going to scare the victim, not maim him. This incident sets off ripples throughout A-Ho’s family – his seemingly perfect brother, studying in cram school so he can become a doctor, starts to crack from the added pressure on him as the good son; his father refuses to acknowledge A-Ho as his son, and is beset by the victim’s father, who demands the compensation the court awarded him; his mother, quietly devastated time and again in this film, takes in A-Ho’s young girlfriend, who is pregnant with his child and living with an aunt. We follow A-Ho through his time in prison and his release, but when Radish, who received a longer sentence, gets out as well, he tracks A-Ho down and proceeds to make more trouble for his ‘friend’ even as A-Ho is trying to live a quiet, law-abiding life.

There are so many layers to A Sun, which is titled “Sunlight Reveals All” in Taiwanese, but at its heart it’s a story about A-Ho and his father, who works as a driving instructor and clearly wants more for both of his kids than he’s gotten from life. Chen Yi-wen, who plays A-Ho’s father Wen, won the Taiwanese equivalent of the Oscar for Best Actor at the Golden Horse Awardst, but his performance here builds over the course of the movie; what starts out as a hackneyed “I have only one son” character develops into far more by the time the movie hits its climax and Wen has to make a choice to help A-Ho when Radish once again has him in trouble. Chen’s performance is anguished and understated, and the dynamic between him and A-Ho (played by Wu Chien-ho, who was also nominated for the Golden Horse for Best Actor) reveals itself slowly to be more complex and emotional than it first appears.

There’s some irony both the original and English titles of A Sun given how much of the movie takes place under cover of night or in pouring rain; even when the sun is out, it’s often shining a light on something we’d rather not see. Director and co-writer Chung Mong-hong gives the film its neo-noir feel by keeping so much of the film in the literal and figurative dark; we don’t learn anything about the reasons for the initial attack until well into the second half of the film, by which point it threatens to upend the audience’s established opinions on various characters, and resets the tone for the drive to the finish. Chung’s script avoids black and white answers, right up through the final scene, in depicting a family that has made mistakes but is also being pushed around by inexorable fate. The sun will rise tomorrow, but you might not like what it shows you.

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→ April 21, 2021
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The Father.

Nominated for six Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture, The Father gives a devastating portrait of dementia from the perspective of the sufferer, recasting the experience as a psychological mystery – but one without the promise of a neat ending. It brings together an incredibly clever screenplay and a BAFTA-winning performance from Anthony Hopkins, while making superb use of the limited space of a film set almost entirely in one flat. (It’s available to rent now as a premium/early access option for $19.99 through amazon and other VOD sites.)

Adapted from the stage version by the playwright Florian Zeller, The Father starts out simply enough: Anthony (Hopkins) is arguing with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman, also nominated for an Oscar) because he has scared off his most recent carer. He says it’s because she stole his watch, and rants about his other daughter, Lucy, whose name seems to bring the film to a screeching halt whenever Anthony broaches the topic. In the following scene, Anthony finds a strange man (Mark Gatiss) in his living room, and the man says he’s Paul, Anne’s partner, whom Anthony doesn’t recognize – and when Anne returns, she’s played by a different actress (Olivia Williams) and Anthony doesn’t recognize her either. Is this just his memory failing, or is something more sinister at play?

The Father utilizes those tricks and more – details of the flat change as well, part of the nonlinear nature of time in this film – to express Anthony’s disorientation to the viewer beyond having him show his confusion. His flat and his daughter’s share a structure, but things like light fixtures, furniture, and wall colors differ slightly, just enough to throw Anthony and the viewer off as we try to figure out not just where we are, but when. Hopkins is truly incredible here, still showing a plus fastball here at age 81 (when it was filmed), delivering the sort of performance the film requires and that you’d expect to see in a stage production. His confusion is palpable, his attempts to mask it through word and action realistic, and his rapid mood shifts – one of the scariest aspects of dementia for family members – are just a series of hard line drives, impressive because they’re subtle and yet impossible to ignore. The script avoids the obvious, such as having Anthony become violent, or scream obscenities, or other possible behaviors of someone with his condition, and instead lets Hopkins deliver the smaller but no less devastating changes in a way that hammers them home to the viewer.

This film is as replete with symbolism as any I can remember watching, perhaps a reflection of its stage origins, although in this sense it felt just as much like a classic novel. The color blue is everywhere in this film – walls, backsplashes, furniture, clothes – which seems like an obvious nod to the sadness and depression suffered by both a patient developing dementia and their loved ones, while the color also appears in a new setting at the end of the film that makes the connection more explicit. Anthony’s obsession with his watch, which can be a common behavior in patients with memory loss, may also represent his slipping grasp of time; in one scene, the time jumps from early morning to evening without a cut, leaving Anthony, still in his pajamas, even more confused than usual. There could be more – the shattered tea cup, the painting above the fireplace, the trees – but I will assume the chicken is, in this case, just a chicken.

The one quibble I have with The Father is the ending, which may be completely realistic but does take away some of the mystery that Zeller built up in the preceding 100 or so minutes with a resolution that, again, is probably accurate to such stories, but took some air out of the dramatic balloon. We spent much of the movie trying to come up with possible explanations for everything that was happening – for example, are Gatiss and Williams some sort of confidence artists? – but the story is much simpler than that.

Hopkins is just incredible here, my favorite lead actor performance of the year, although I don’t think there’s any chance he wins the award over Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (and I’m not sure I would want to see the reaction if he did). Colman is superb as well, my favorite of the three nominees I’ve seen, although it appears the favorite is one I haven’t seen, Youn Yuh-jung for Minari. It’s also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, which could be its best chance for a win on Sunday. As for the film itself, I would still lean towards Nomadland for Best Picture, but this sits at #2 on my ranking of movies from the 2020-early 2021 awards cycle, with just a couple of candidates left to see, and one more that made my top 5 still left to review.

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→ April 18, 2021
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Collective.

Collective has repeated the feat of 2019’s Honeyland by earning nominations in the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature categories at the Oscars, and if I had a vote, I’d at least give it a nod in the first one. It’s an amazing story that became bigger and more impressive well after the filmmakers had already chosen their subjects, as a small group of investigative reporters helped bring down an entire government, only to have the same party voted back into power less than a year later.

Collective (Colectiv) was a nightclub in Bucharest, Romania, that was the site of a deadly fire caused by the use of pyrotechnics at an indoor concert, which ignited the soundproofing in the venue – the same cause of the Station fire in Providence, Rhode Island, about 12 years earlier. Where the Collective fire differed, however, was the lower death toll at the site; 26 people died at the scene, but 38 more died later in hospitals, with 146 people injured. An journalist at a daily sports newspaper, The Sports Gazette, saw the number of deaths in hospitals as worthy of further investigation, and the work he and his colleagues did uncovered a massive corruption scandal that included a supplier of disinfectants to hospitals diluting the solution ten times, rendering it ineffective, and the refusal to send some patients abroad to burn units for fear it would reflect badly on the ruling party. The technocrat who takes over the Ministry of Health after the government collapses discovers that the state-run health system is rotten to the core, and there is no straightforward way to fix it or root out corruption. In the end, therefore, little really changes, and we are left to think that the corruption will resume with the restoration of the Social Democrats to power and the government’s failure to replace incompetent hospital managers. In parallel, we see parts of the journey of one of the survivors, Tedy Ursuleanu, who was very badly burned, losing parts of both hands and suffering burns all over her body, as she tries to reclaim something of her life, creating an art installation that provides the movie with some of its most central imagery.

Collective works as a documentary more than anything else because the story is so incredible and so vast in scope. What must have seemed at first to be just a film that followed some investigative reporters looking into irregularities around a major tragedy turned out to be a scandal that reached the top levels of the Romanian national government – something the documentary makers couldn’t have anticipated. They also received what appears to be unfettered access to meetings held by the technocrat Minister, who comes across as a would-be reformer who wants to be as transparent as possible with the press and public, but whose hands are tied by existing regulations and contracts and realizes he can’t do anything he’d want to do to try to fix the system. Meanwhile, the reporters keep uncovering new angles to the scandal, enough that you would think Romanian voters would have had no interest in voting for the same party that oversaw the erosion of the state hospital network, but they did so, the one event in the film that probably could have used some more explanation. It means the film ends on something of a hopeless note, which I suppose was unavoidable – documentary makers can’t choose their endings – but it’s a gut punch to watch all of the survivors and victims’ family members for nearly two hours, only to see that the state and the voters just don’t care enough to act on it.

I’ve seen all five nominated documentaries, and Collective would be my choice for the award, with Crip Camp second. This film does what I think great documentaries need to do – it stays out of the way of the story it’s telling. That’s not always possible, depending on the circumstances of the film’s subject, but in this case the filmmakers’ access to the reporters, press briefings, and eventually the Ministry’s internal meetings obviated any need for narration or other structure. It can be very hard to watch in the early going, because the camera doesn’t shy away from the details – we have footage from inside the concert venue, and we see plenty of burn victims, including one stomach-churning shot of a victim in the hospital whose wounds contain live maggots – but this film, more than any of the other nominated ones, has the power to force changes, if not in Romania, then perhaps elsewhere in the world. We need more documentaries like this, and more reporters like those who broke the story, and Collective should be an inspiration to anyone who tells stories for a living.

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→ April 12, 2021
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The Oracle Year.

I’m not sure how I first heard about The Oracle Year, the first prose novel from graphic novelist Charles Soule, but I believe it was a positive review rather than a reader recommendation. It sat unpurchased on my wishlist for some time before I gave up and bought it myself, and then tore through the novel’s 400 pages in less than four days. It’s weird and improbable and incredibly compelling, with so much velocity to it that I could forgive its faults, and never could put the book down for long.

Will Dando is a more or less unemployed bassist who wakes up one morning with 108 oddly specific predictions about the future in his head, and when he writes them down, he realizes that the first few were accurate, so with the help of his friend Hamza, he dubs himself the Oracle, sets up a site (called the Site) to publish certain predictions, and sells a few others for a massive profit. This endeavor leads to substantial and largely foreseeable consequences, not the least of which is that he’s attracted the attention of the FBI, religious leaders, and a few other folks who would like to know his secret or just generally shut him down. For reasons that even he doesn’t fully understand, however, Will can’t just stop being the Oracle, even when it’s clear that doing so is his best shot to save himself, Hamza, and Hamza’s pregnant wife Miko, both of whom become deeply involved in the Oracle’s undertakings. Eventually, those predictions lead to real-world violence and many preventable deaths, sending Will into an existential crisis and opening up questions of free will, the inevitability of history, and just who sent Will those predictions in the first place.

The Oracle Year is nuts, and I mean that in a very good way. The pace never lets up, and Soule has managed to populate the book with interesting and strange characters – not many with depth, but at least with enough complexity to make them seem real on the page. There’s the Protestant televangelist Hosiah Branson, who fulminates against the Oracle from his pulpit, only to find that one of the 108 predictions is about him. There are two feds who clearly loathe each other but who have to work together to find the Oracle, because their boss says so. There’s the fixer named the Coach, the most intriguing and wonderful character outside of Dando – I’d read an entire book about the Coach, but I won’t spoil any details about them here. There are also a lot of people here who completely lose sight of their own humanity in trying to figure out who the Oracle is or what he’s doing or how to profit from his predictions, including, I’d argue, Hamza, even though much of what he plans as Will’s “business partner” turns out to be prudent. And then there’s Leigh Shore, the frustrated gossip reporter who latches on to the Oracle as a story and ends up (unsurprisingly) directly involved in the plot, a character who has one dimension, her ambition to get the story that will make her career, but it’s a good dimension for a character who ends up proving somewhat critical to the resolution of the story.

Where the plot goes is both extremely clever, reminiscent of good time-travel fiction like that of Connie Willis, and a little bit too easy. Soule has a very strong grasp of a storyline that could easily spin out of control, and brings back earlier elements to help close the story in a way that feels tightly plotted. He also has Dando and some of the other characters talk their way out of trouble that might not play out quite so easily in the real world – it’s not completely implausible, but at the least, Soule rushes through some of the dialogue where Dando (or someone else) argues a point and his antagonist concedes too quickly despite having the upper hand. It’s a small complaint for a novel that so engrossed me that I had to slow myself down to make sure I wasn’t skipping whole sentences, but I definitely got a sense near the end that I knew how this was all going to work out, and that it probably wouldn’t be wholly satisfying. But man did this thing hum along in a way few novels do, and Soule is obviously quite intelligent and tech-savvy enough to make some of the ways in which Hamza and Dando protect the Oracle’s identity credible.

Next up: Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.

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→ April 8, 2021
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is such a small, wonderful film that might have found its audience had it had a normal theatrical run last year, but Focus purchased it out of Sundance and sent it to streaming after three days in theaters right at the start of the pandemic, so it seems to have escaped a lot of notice. It’s a gem of a movie that takes an unsparing look at abortion and just how difficult the United States makes it for women to exercise this most basic form of autonomy over their own bodies. (You can watch it on HBO Max or via HBO on amazon.)

Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is a 17-year-old living in a rural town in northern Pennsylvania who suspects she might be pregnant, so she goes to a ‘pregnancy crisis center,’ one of those fake clinics where they try to prevent pregnant women from making rational choices, often by lying to them. Autumn decides she wants to get an abortion, so her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) steals some money from the grocery store where they work – for a truly creepy manager – and they hop a bus to New York City, where parental consent isn’t required as it is in the backwater where they live. Once they arrive, however, they realize that the procedure won’t be as quick or simple as they’d been led to believe, and they have to make some unpleasant choices to stay in the city and let Autumn get a proper abortion.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always does so much right with this story, but foremost among them is how granular it gets throughout the process. There’s an attention to detail here that puts you deeply into the story in a way that tries to express the difficulty, stress, and sheer exasperation that Autumn faces, even though she’s sure about her decision. The scenes at the pregnancy crisis center, or her intake interview at Planned Parenthood in New York, or as she and Skylar end up trying to pass the night at the Port Authority and riding the subways all give more time to the minutiae of the moment, passing in something more like real time, giving it a documentary/cinema verité feel.

There are also some small but clearly conscious choices on the part of director/screenwriter Eliza Hittman that drive home Autumn’s anguish and isolation. The intake interview – the best scene in the film, and the scene that gives the movie its title – has the camera focused exclusively on Autumn, even when the kind woman interviewing her is doing most of the talking. Autumn and Skylar are together for long periods where they don’t speak as the camera follows them around Manhattan, or just shows us the two of them trying to sleep in the station, emphasizing that Autumn can simultaneously be alone and with her cousin. If Hittman used any artificial lighting, it wasn’t evident; the whole film has a tinge of grey to it, and the indoor scenes all look like they’re lit solely by the cold fluorescent lights ubiquitous in offices and other public spaces. The script is clearly on the side of a woman’s right to choose, and expresses that view through an intensely realistic look at the process from positive test to the abortion itself, undermining any argument that this is something women do cavalierly while showing just how many obstacles our supposedly free country throws in their way.

Flanigan made their film debut in NRSA, and earned a slew of honors for their performance here, winning Best Actress from Boston and New York critics circles. The film depends so much on Flanigan that you can’t understate the importance of her work, which is superb – she’s entirely believable and disappears into this role, owning that scene in the PP intake interview that, for me, defined this film. It can’t work without a knockout performance, but they deliver one, and you can add Flanigan to the list of actresses who I think deserved an Oscar nomination over Andra Day (who did her best with a badly written role) this year. I’d also put this movie in my top ten for 2020 right now, with maybe a half-dozen possible contenders for that still on my to-watch list, including Minari, The Father, and First Cow. It’s great, and manages to educate without becoming didactic, while telling an important, compelling story.

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