Emma Donoghue and Lenny Abrahamson, 2015

more than moderate
   spoilers

#56, 2015 Skandies

Mind the sled.  I knew nothing about this going in and I am very glad of it.

In the film’s opening moments, it quickly becomes clear why the story has the name it has: we’ve got a young woman and her long-haired five-year-old son living in a tiny space that is simul­taneously bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen.  I re-watched The Day After with Ellie earlier this year, so initially my thoughts turned to the possibility that they were stuck in a bunker follow­ing some sort of apocalypse.  The actual situation is much worse.  The young woman was abducted at age 17 and has been locked in a shed by her captor for seven years.  Her son is five, so do the math.

There have been a number of splashy cases like this over the years.  The book on which this film is based was in turn based on the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, imprisoned in a small basement by her father from age 18 to 42, giving birth to seven children.  There was the case in Cleveland in which three kidnapped women were freed after years of captivity⁠—Michelle Knight was imprisoned from age 21 to 32, Amanda Berry from 16 to 27, and Gina DeJesus from 14 to 23.  All were raped, two were impreg­nated, one bore a child.  And then here in the Bay Area was the case of Jaycee Dugard, snatched off the street at age 11 and held captive until she was 29, giving birth twice.  Those are just the ones that sprang to mind while I was watching this movie; I see that out there on the internets you can find lists of many, many more.  I have no personal connection to anything remotely like this⁠—no reason to find a scenario like that in Room to be “trig­gering”⁠—yet the first act of this movie is one of the most trau­matic things I’ve ever watched.  I felt like I was going to throw up and before the end of the act my hands were shaking.  I’ve read reviews that indicated that some members of the audience were bawling for an hour straight, and I can imagine myself being one of those people.  (Though in my case it would be partly because of the movie and partly because of all the people around me poking away at their phones.)

For a while there it looked like the entire movie was going to take place in the shed-slash-cell, but not only is there some major heroism both from the little boy and from a cop who cracks the case all by herself on the basis of some very scanty information, but after telegraphing a bittersweet turn in which the boy es­capes but the mom is killed, the movie swerves to give us pretty much the best possible outcome under the circumstances: kid lives, mom lives, bad guy is apprehended.  And then the movie shifts into a much less intense gear for its final hour, as it turns into an observational piece about the captives’ adjustment to the world outside the shed⁠—a world the boy has only seen on TV and had been told was all make-believe.  As for the mom: it turns out that, paradoxically, pure survival instinct can keep you going when your situation is dire and your life is under constant threat, but then when that threat is removed… 

So, yeah⁠—gripping but harrowing first half, well-observed but slow and anticlimactic second half.  Very well-acted throughout.  The mom is played by Brie Larson, whom I knew as Abed’s girlfriend for three episodes of Community, and who I just now learned won the Oscar for Best Actress for this part⁠—I guess if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been expecting her to turn up dead at the 57‑minute mark!  And the kid is played by one Jacob Tremblay, who turns in a compelling performance and has probably gone on to do other stuff I am not yet familiar with because I am still living in 2015.

Oh, hi Mark Ruffalo.

Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy, 2015

#65, 2015 Skandies; AMPAS Best Picture

This is a journalism procedural about the big Boston Globe story back in 2002 about the Catholic Church’s systematic, decades-long cover-up of priests sexually preying on children.  It’s not as though the existence of priests who molested children was any big secret⁠—I remember seeing people back in 1994 muttering online about how the Church’s solution to priests sexually abusing altar boys was to “give them altar girls to play with”⁠—but the Globe story did lead to the resignation of the cardinal assigned to Boston.  (He was promptly reassigned to a high-ranking position in Rome.)

I am mystified as to why this was even a movie, let alone why it won Best Picture.  There’s nothing cinematic about it.  It’s two hours of reporters knocking on doors, doing interviews, answer­ing phones, having meetings.  I guess it’s kind of interesting to see how a corrupt institution flexes its power: making docu­ments go missing in official archives, passing “friendly advice” along alumni networks, etc.  But as a narrative, it’s still pretty lifeless.  As I have noted in past articles, Best Picture often goes to a movie that celebrates just how wonderful and important movies are, so it’s a bit of a change of pace to instead celebrate just how wonderful and important investigative journalism is.  And while Spotlight doesn’t really highlight this at all, there’s something elegiac about the movie for those of us who have watched the collapse of the local newspaper as an institution.  The New York Times and Washington Post are still staying afloat, but they’re not going to assign a team to investigate corruption on the Anytown, U.S.A., City Council.  So, sure, to warn that corruption is rampant among institutions at all levels and will remain so without strong local investigative journalism is a worthy endeavor.  That doesn’t make Spotlight any less humdrum a movie.

Phoebe Gloeckner and Marielle Heller, 2015

#69, 2015 Skandies

This is certainly not the tightest narrative I’ve ever encountered, and I think the filmmakers bobbled the ending a bit, but unless I hit a huge surprise as I reach the end of my watch list, it looks like this is going to end up as my top film of 2015 by default.  It scores high on Patterns #24 and #26: I was impressed by the way it evoked a specific time and place (very permissive San Fran­cisco in the very permissive 1970s), and by the fact that, while it did sanitize the source material a bit, it did so to the extent that a European movie would rather than an American one.  And not only does the setting land, but so do the characters.  Watching Spotlight, I felt like I was watching the stirring adventures of Reporter #1, Reporter #2, and Reporter #3.  In The Diary, even the bit players feel specific and memorable.  I was already fami­liar with this material⁠—not from the book on which this movie is based, but from Phoebe Gloeckner’s earlier memoir, A Child’s Life, which has a lot of overlap with The Diary⁠—so when this movie started, my jaw kind of dropped: somehow the filmmakers magically peeled the Phoebe Gloeckner character off the comics page and turned her into a living person.