Olivier Assayas, 2014
#9, 2015 Skandies
I try to learn as little as possible about the movies I watch, because it’s fun to have no idea what I’m getting into, but I had heard that this one was by Olivier Assayas, who had impressed me enough with Summer Hours and Carlos that this was the film in the 2015 batch that I was most looking forward to. Well, this one was not really for me—but it says a lot about Assayas that I could still recognize that it was very good, just not for me. I frequently complain (for instance, in my recent article on Carol) that a running time of two hours isn’t enough to accomplish much—in particular, it isn’t enough time to convincingly depict the growth of a relationship. But Clouds of Sils Maria is so thematically dense that it feels like an epic, despite that same two-hour running time. And a lot of those themes do strike chords with me—the film has a lot to say about the generational diagonal, the way that the traversal of life stages intersects with the traversal of historical eras. I really liked that aspect of the story.
But the same thing I noted about The Artist and Argo and Birdman applies here: “people who put on performances for a living sure do think that stories about people putting on performances are super duper fascinating.” The basic premise of Clouds of Sils Maria is that an famous actress has agreed to take a role in a huge play in London—it’s about a middle-aged businesswoman who finds herself tangled in an affair with her manipulative young assistant, and while the actress had launched her career at age 18 playing the assistant, now she’s playing the businesswoman. Scenes operate on multiple levels, as she runs lines with her own personal assistant reading the part of the office assistant, and often when those scenes begin it’s hard to tell whether the two women are speaking in or out of character. And of course the third level is that whether we are watching them “in character” or “out of character”, ultimately we are watching performances, for this is a movie and there are real actresses playing these parts. It’s acting about acting, a movie about movies (and plays), and it prompted me to finally add a new pattern about this sort of thing:
43 | I confess that I have written more than my share of meta stuff, and am even guilty of the exact thing I am about to complain about. But it gets tiresome to read books about writing, to watch movies about filmmaking, to listen to songs about performing music, etc. “Write what you know” is a good rule, but it works better if you know something other than how to craft this particular type of creative work. |
And on top of that—c’mon, a movie about the relationship between a big celebrity and her personal assistant? Who is this for? Who can relate to this? Duncan Black recently wrote a short post about how the problem with trend pieces is that they tend to reflect a methodology of “What are my friends and I doing?”, and the practices of wealthy New Yorkers are not actually representative of, y’know, trends. The problem with most successful art being done by successful artists is that the life of a successful artist is a similarly unrepresentative life to explore.
article spoils thepremise
Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman, 2015
#10, 2015 Skandies
Again, I try to learn as little as possible about the movies I watch, so while I had heard somewhere along the line that this was a Charlie Kaufman movie, I had no idea going in that it was all done with puppets. Nor had I heard why it was all done with puppets. It turns out that the central gimmick of this movie is that everyone other than the protagonist has the same face. Different hair, different clothes… same face. (The faces aren’t even finished: they’re made of disconnected plates.) On top of which, everyone has the same voice. Men, women, children, people in old movies—it’s the same guy with the same cadences talking for everyone, sort of like in Prospero’s Books, only instead of John Gielgud it’s some dudebro. Then, one day, the protagonist meets a woman whose face and voice are, miraculously, different.
A lot of the reviews of Clouds of Sils Maria made a big deal out of the performance of Kristen Stewart, who plays the famous actress’s personal assistant. At the time, and perhaps still, Stewart was best known for playing Bella in the Twilight movies. I knew very little about Twilight until quite recently, when I watched the Rifftrax of the first movie with Ellie. Ellie pointed out that Bella has basically no real traits—a deliberate choice to make her a fairly blank, “project yourself here” protagonist for the audience of adolescent girls (and women wishing they were still adolescent girls). What attracts Edward the vampire to her is that, randomly, her blood smells good to him, and he can’t read her mind. (I did something similar with my own vampire-in-Washington-state story, written ten years before Twilight.) Like Bella, the title character of Anomalisa doesn’t really stand out: she’s nice, not all that bright, has pretty dull interests, lacks self-esteem due to a mild facial disfigurement… but she has that voice. Initially.
This is a really compelling and even profound metaphor, which makes Anomalisa a movie I’m glad to have seen, but it was not actually a movie I enjoyed watching. I came very close to giving up on it. Why? Because hearing Lisa’s voice needs to feel like a reprieve from hell, and the film succeeds a bit too well on that count. The world where everyone has that lantern-jawed face and that dude-a-riffic voice… again, Sartre may have said that hell is other people, but this film makes a very strong case that hell is that specific other person. And as much as spending a long stretch of the film in hell is necessary to make the story work, spending so much time in hell is very far from fun.
spoiler level:high
Taylor Sheridan and Denis Villeneuve, 2015
#12, 2015 Skandies
War in the desert! U.S. soldiers shooting it out with little bands of brown guys in Third World cities full of long-suffering women and shellshocked kids! CIA operatives performing “enhanced interrogation” on “high-value targets” in government black sites! We’ve seen this before, but this time we’re not in Iraq or Afghanistan. We’re on the U.S./Mexico border.
This is far from an original observation, but Sicario is a Pattern 8 movie, notable chiefly for its narrative structure. It’s sort of the anti-Zero Dark Thirty. That movie was about an Inexperienced But Strong Female Protagonist who puts her nose down and gets to work, sticks with what she knows is right, and ends up taking down Osama bin Laden, at least by proxy. Sicario is about an Inexperienced But Strong Female Protagonist who puts her nose down and gets to work, sticks with what she knows is right, and ends up squeezed out of her own movie. Her name is Kate, and she’s an FBI field agent who distinguishes herself in the opening sequence, a raid on a cartel-linked house in a Phoenix suburb. When the protagonist of Zero Dark Thirty is selected to work on higher-level operations, it’s because the top brass sees something in her. When Kate is selected to work on higher-level operations, it turns out that it is because the top brass needed to dupe someone into providing a bureaucratic fig leaf so they could conduct CIA operations on U.S. soil. The CIA has decided that the solution to the narco-terrorism along the border is to back a Medellín takeover of the Mexican cartels in hopes of imposing order, and its big wheels have no qualms about torturing cartel bosses’ relatives, murdering their children, or starting gigantic firefights in areas packed with civilians. Kate insists on doing things by the book—and thus is put out of action by a CIA-sponsored Medellín hitman, the sicario of the title, whom we start following around instead of Kate around the 90-minute mark. When we do eventually circle back to Kate, she gives up her final protest and signs off on the operation when it is made clear to her that the alternative is to end up with her brains pointlessly splattered against the wall of her apartment.
Kate actually loses every fight she gets into, because S.H.I.E.L.D. agents aren’t actually a thing and a well-trained woman who weighs 115 pounds will not defeat an equally well-trained man who weighs 175. On the other hand, the sicario basically is a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent: though he’s just a middle-aged lawyer, having his family killed seems to have somehow turned him into an invincible fighting machine, easily dispatching squadrons of armed guards singlehandedly and getting his revenge on the cartel sub-chief. Good for him, I guess, but the final scene of the film makes it clear that in terms of the bigger picture, this too is ultimately pointless—it has all the impact on the situation in Juárez that endlessly knocking off the #3 guy in al-Qaeda had in Iraq. It turns out that in a world of bad guys and worse guys endlessly trading atrocities, one determined individual can do precisely nothing, whether he is an invincible S.H.I.E.L.D. agent or she is an Inexperienced But Strong Female Protagonist.
Michael Almereyda, 2015
#14, 2015 Skandies
As the film itself notes, anyone who has taken a Psych 101 class—which I have to think is most of the audience for this movie—already knows about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments. Acting them out is basically just an exercise in illustrating a passage from a textbook. The biopic portions (Milgram gets married! he has a kid! whoops, he dies of a heart attack!) are uninteresting filler, which the filmmakers try to salvage through weird artifices like playing scenes in front of fake backgrounds. And the debate over whether Milgram’s experiments were unethical is also not explored in any real depth. There are a few interesting hints of ideas, though. Milgram is charged not only with having deceived the subjects of his obedience experiments but also, by putting them in a position in which a figure of authority orders them to deliver electric shocks to another human being, with having subjected them to trauma. But that authority consisted solely of a gray lab coat, a briskly impersonal voice, and a privileged demographic position, not any actual power over the subjects—Milgram had expected that the vast majority of his subjects would quickly rebel, not agonize and submit. Thus, the film suggests, the real trauma suffered by the 65% of subjects who kept flipping switches to deliver (fake) shocks all the way into the “XXX” range, as the confederate (on tape) screamed and demanded that the experiment be halted, was less the stress of the situation Milgram had concocted than what the subjects learned about themselves. They didn’t like their reflections and blamed the manufacturer of the mirror. And the film also suggests that we can take this interpretation a step further. We spend so much time obsessing over who we are, figuring out what labels to apply, building shrines to ourselves (like, y’know, web sites consisting of our names dot our initials). I can tell you from personal experience that teachers in the humanities are very strongly encouraged to have students write about themselves and their personal perspectives on the day’s material pretty much incessantly. But, the Milgram character muses, one of the lessons of his work is that human behavior is largely situational—that the outputs depend far more on the inputs than on any mediation that we might chalk up to a “self”. The scary thing about the reflection in the mirror is that there’s not much to see.
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