Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2016
#58, 2016 Skandies
So here’s another movie that, like The Nice Guys from last time, tries to be a riot of outlandish situations and comedic exchanges, and is even by the people who made one of the landmarks in that genre, The Big Lebowski, but which falls flat. That’s not just my opinion: the Skandie voters are normally a Coen-friendly bunch, so for this one to only come in 58th is something of an indictment. For me it fell afoul of Pattern 43: it’s yet another movie about movies, and in this case, a lot of the comedy is supposed to derive from the movie’s extended affectionate parodies of 1950s Hollywood film genres: Biblical epic, unreconstructed Western, lush Sirkian melodrama, Busby Berkeley musical, etc., etc. It turns out that when you make a picture for 75-year-old movie critics, even the 50-year-old movie critics are likely to be left cold.
Bonnie Nadzam and Ross Partridge, 2015
#97, 2016 Skandies
Last time I wrote that “unless it somehow gets caught at the wire,” The Nice Guys “will almost certainly be my pick of the 2016 litter”. Well, here’s the wire, and The Nice Guys may have just been caught. I certainly had a better time watching The Nice Guys, with all its big laughs and “holy @#$%!!” moments, than I did watching Lamb, which is pretty harrowing at times. But Lamb feels to me like the better film. Probably the best film I’ve seen for the first time since, hmm… I guess Gravity, 2271 days ago!
I mentioned last time that The Nice Guys reminded me of a lot of movies I’d seen in the ’90s, and the same is true of Lamb, but in this case I mean a different sort of film. During my year off before grad school I used to watch a lot of indie movies at the art theaters in Berkeley, and later, when I was finishing up the hardcover version of Ready, Okay!, I used to drive down to the art theaters in Costa Mesa a couple of times a week to catch indie movies down there. Lamb would have fit in nicely alongside something like Buffalo ’66. Actually, the two films have quite a bit in common. Buffalo ’66 was about an unstable guy who kidnaps a woman, played by Christina Ricci in her first adult role, and forces to her to playact the role of his girlfriend on a visit to his parents’ house—only to find that she takes to the role enthusiastically and wants to stay with him after the visit is over. Lamb also involves an ambiguous kidnapping, and the target looks strikingly similar to Christina Ricci. Except this time around it’s Addams Family-era Christina Ricci. She’s eleven.
Reading reviews, I saw a lot of people comparing Lamb to Lolita, though the pairing in Lamb captures the shock value of that in the novel more than any film of Lolita itself ever has. Vladimir Nabokov grumbled that Hollywood would take twelve-year-old Dolly and “make her sixteen and Humbert twenty-six”, and sure enough, every actress playing Dolly has been a sixteen-year-old in pigtails. The girl in Lamb, by contrast, looks like a child: when she was asked what grade she’s in and she said seventh, I gaped, because my guess was going to be third or fourth. Heightening the contrast, the guy is Humbert’s senior by a decade, and looks like one part David Duchovny and two parts Mitt Romney. But the comparison between the two works is actually not as facile as “old guy, young girl, Lolita!”. Lolita initially trades in ambiguity, as Dolly initiates a lot of the early interactions between herself and Humbert. Lamb does the same. The girl, Tommie, is neglected at home and the butt of jokes at school, and when David Lamb, whom she randomly meets in a parking lot where he’s clearing his head after his father’s funeral, shows her some positive attention, she reacts like a wilted plant to water. She decides of her own accord to keep coming back to that spot in hopes of seeing him again; she’s the one who asks to trade email addresses so they won’t fall out of contact. She is enthusiastic about the idea of skipping town with Lamb without telling anyone, heading off to his father’s cabin in Wyoming to recharge. As Lolita develops, though, it gradually drops the ambiguity and implicitly endorses the concept behind statutory rape laws, making the case that a tween just entering adolescence cannot know what she’s getting herself into in making sexual advances to an adult. For all of Humbert’s attempts to paint his relationship with Dolly as situated deep within a gray area, the facts are black and white: he’s made a sex slave out of her, and in no possible way could she hold a scintilla of blame for that. Lamb keeps its situation ambiguous for a lot longer. Is this just an odd couple from an indie movie—two misfits striking up an unlikely friendship that society doesn’t understand but is healing for both of them? Or are we about to take a sickening turn and end up in a prequel to Room? When Tommie starts crying that she wants to go home and Lamb won’t turn around, or whe she screams at Lamb to get out of the bathroom while she’s in the tub and he won’t go, it looks like we’re headed to a very dark place… but then those scenes fizzle out peacefully, we’re back to Tommie loving the road trip and insisting that she wants to stay with Lamb and never go back, and the pendulum continues to swing back and forth. And what makes Lamb such a good movie is that it’s not just about that plot point—there’s more to it than just whether that coin will come up heads or tails. It’s the most absorbing character study I’ve seen in a while—I felt like I got a pretty deep sense of who Lamb is, who Tommie is, what motivates them at each juncture of the film… and that’s just a starting point. You can then go on to consider themes such as, irrespective of Lamb’s motivations, what effect will he turn out to have had on Tommie’s later life? Is the pendulum swinging not between “harmful” and “harmless” but between “sexual and emotional abuse” and “non-sexual emotional abuse”? Or say the effect on Tommie is positive—unlikely, but positing it for the sake of argument—does that make it acceptable to use another person to work through one’s own issues? The reflex is to say no, but is there anybody in the world who’s never done that to any extent? It’s a rewardingly rich story to mull over.
After the movie was over, I was curious about how closely it adhered to the novel on which it was based. It turns out that the novel is mostly dialogue and I zipped through it at a lightning-fast pace that is completely unlike me—normally I’m a very slow reader. Anyway, it turns out that the answer is “extremely closely”. It follows the novel scene by scene and beat by beat, sticking to the dialogue on the page with just a few trims here and there. So I would say that Bonnie Nadzam gets the lion’s share of the credit here—but, actually, I liked the movie more than the book. For something like this, without a lot of interiority, being able to see the expressions on the characters’ faces, consider their body language, hear the quaver in their voices, means a lot. In review after review recently I have been lamenting that, oh, this actress or that actress could have played Alley. I wonder what Bonnie Nadzam thought seeing young Oona Laurence turn her character Tommie from words on a page into a phenomenal performance.
Margot Lee Shetterly, Allison Schoeder, and Theodore Melfi, 2016
#105, 2016 Skandies
To wrap up 2016, I thought I’d check out this movie about a very interesting aspect of history: the substantial contribution of African-American women to the U.S. space program in the 1960s. Specifically, it is about Katherine Johnson, a math genius who crunched the numbers for the first few manned launches; Dorothy Vaughan, who led NASA’s transition from manual calculation to computer programming; and Mary Jackson, aerodynamics engineer. As history, it is not so hot: dates have been changed in order to make these women’s rise to prominent positions coincide with the first few American launches (in reality, the women had worked their way up in the 1950s, well before the first astronauts went up), and the movie makes up a contemporaneous fight for desegregation within NASA whose constituent incidents had either happened earlier in real life or had never had to happen at all. (The West Area Computing Unit depicted in the film was part of the segregated NACA, not the integrated NASA, and was shut down in 1958.) Characters are made up to serve as bigoted villains and get their comeuppance. Outbursts full of righteous fury are placed in the mouths of characters who would in reality have been fired for them, but in the movie shame the higher-ups into mending their ways. Basically, any time the filmmakers have to choose between fidelity to history and the opportunity to gin up a crowd-pleasing moment, history has to hit the bricks. So, yeah, it’s pandering Oscar bait, but for putting a deserved spotlight on some long overlooked historical figures, and perhaps even reviving a little bit of interest in the space program, I have to give it at least a little bit of applause for its intent.
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |
|||