Kenneth Lonergan, 2016
#1, 2016 Skandies
When I was in my teacher credentialing program, I was assigned an
article about teaching films to high school English classes, and to
my surprise, the film that topped its list of recommendations was
The Sweet
Hereafter!
That was my favorite movie for a lot of years there, and it is still
comfortably within my top five!
And I did need a central text for my unit about non-linear
storytelling—I couldn’t think of one I would enjoy
teaching more than The Sweet Hereafter, and
here I had an official endorsement of that choice!
So I gave it a go, and I thought the unit was a big success.
But it did occur to me: that article came out in the year 2000, three
years after the release of The Sweet
Hereafter.
Now it’s 2022.
The Sweet Hereafter is a quarter of a century
old.
It doesn’t feel dated to me, and Kids
These Days™ do tend to be more conversant with
older media
than previous generations were, but still, I did make a mental note to
keep an eye out for a replacement text from this century.
Manchester by the Sea might fit the bill!
Not only does it jump around in time the same way, but thematically
it’s pretty similar, with its focus on grief and loss.
It’s by the creator of Margaret, so storytelling quality is correspondingly
high.
spoilers start
here
And I enthusiastically endorse the film’s project, subverting a
clichéd story arc.
The protagonist, Lee, is a broken man, haunted by an unspeakable loss
for which he is largely responsible.
When his brother dies, the will calls for Lee to take custody of his
teenage nephew, Patrick.
You can write the rest yourself: Lee protests that he isn’t ready
for the responsibility, but with no choice in the matter, he draws upon
inner resources that he didn’t know he had, and through his bond
with this boy, is able to start putting himself back together and
finally begin to heal, etc., etc.
But as Margaret demonstrated, Lonergan is one
of cinema’s foremost exponents of realism, and that’s not
always how life works.
So when this movie concluded with Lee discovering that he would
never get over what happened, that he was
right when he said that he would never be ready
for this responsibility, I gave that narrative decision a big
thumbs-up.
But not the movie as a whole. Quite a few of the reviews I read said something along the lines of, “Very good movie! Great script! Excellent performances! But, I dunno, it just didn’t do it for me.” That’s pretty much where I am. This is a movie about Lee and Patrick, and I didn’t care for or about those dudes enough for this movie to make the list of films I’d be particularly interested in teaching.
Jim Jarmusch, 2016
#2, 2016 Skandies
Another movie named after a grim town in the Northeast, Paterson is a fair bit cheerier than Manchester by the Sea. It’s the story of a bus driver who writes poetry in his spare time—well, wait, no. It’s not the story of anything, because it’s not really much of a story at all. It’s one of those textural tone poem things. (Uh‑oh!) Anyway, it’s about a bus driver who smiles as he eavesdrops on the conversations of the passengers on his bus, has an artsy girlfriend with a sunny disposition, walks said girlfriend’s grotesque dog down to the corner bar every night and exchanges hellos with the locals, and generally seems content with his lot in life. And he writes poetry in his spare time. I didn’t think the poetry was very good, but it was better than the poetry posted around the Lloyd Center mall in Portland, so that’s something. There is some brief drama at the bar, quickly defused, and to the extent that there’s any sort of plot, it’s that the girlfriend tries her hand at selling artsy cupcakes at the farmers’ market and makes a decent profit, she and the bus driver go out to celebrate, and when they return, they discover that the dog has utterly obliterated the bus driver’s notebook of poems—poems he’d been working on for months, and of which he had no other copies. I heartily endorse the message that dogs are terrible and ruin everything, but the movie goes another way and has the bus driver, after a period of some very mild moping, go back to writing poems. The struggle itself toward The Heights is enough to something something.
Maren Ade, 2016
#3, 2016 Skandies
This movie is largely set in the world of multinational corporations, where people who speak at least three languages attend ritzy functions and plan how to increase profits by outsourcing jobs. Ines, midway up the corporate ladder as she enters middle age, is stationed in Bucharest working on a consulting contract and trying to make a favorable impression on the higher-ups. Enter her father, a slovenly prankster who makes an unannounced visit and cannot behave himself when accompanying her to the aforementioned ritzy functions. When Ines finally sends him home, he instead turns up again, now wearing a terrible wig and grotesque false teeth, and follows her around making a nuisance of himself, which we are apparently meant to find comical. After an hour and a half I couldn’t take any more. I figured I’d put in a regular movie’s worth of time and just couldn’t take nearly three hours of this cretin.
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