Vanessa Taylor and Guillermo del Toro, 2017
#28,
2017 Skandies;
AMPAS Best Picture
This movie starts by introducing us to a mute woman with gills who lives above a grand movie palace. In the middle of the night she heads out of her apartment and emerges onto a city street, the signs and cars suggesting that we are in the early 1960s, and hops on a bus to work as a janitor at some sort of high-tech facility full of turbines and oscilloscopes. Then she returns to watch TV with her elderly neighbor, whose refrigerator is stocked with nothing but a dozen slices of vile-looking key lime pie from the local diner, each with one bite taken out of it. Oh, and everything in the movie is either green or teal. So, yeah, this is not our world, but a movie world meant to be whimsical and wondrous—I later saw that this movie was billed as a “fairy tale for adults”. I lasted a bit over half an hour before fast-forwarding through the rest. I saw that Mike D’Angelo had written that his reaction to every Guillermo del Toro film was a feeling of “respectful indifference” that, if he were forced to put it into words, could be summarized as “I acknowledge your cinephilia”. What is apathy for him is antipathy for me. As with Wonderstruck, if your movie is about its own movie-ness, I will probably dislike it.
I also checked Outlaw Vern’s site to see what he’d had to say about it, and discovered that one reader had stirred up a hullaballoo down in the comments. See, I’d heard a little bit about this movie going in, since it had won the Oscar—specifically, I’d heard it referred to as “the fish-fucking movie”. Sure enough, there is a sea monster in the movie, and the gill woman fucks it. Vern and most of his readers were dubious about this, since the sea monster’s demonstrated intelligence amounted to understanding the gill woman’s demonstration that a hard-boiled egg is a foodstuff. Essentially, they argued, the gill woman had befriended the sea monster the way one might befriend a dog or a horse, except then, y’know, she fucked it. But one commenter strenuously objected to this reading. It’s a metaphor, he maintained. Look at how the demographically subaltern characters—the African-American janitor, the gay neighbor—help the gill woman smuggle the sea monster out of the high-tech facility. This goes to show that the gill woman’s affair with the sea monster is meant to stand for any kind of sexuality that transgresses societal norms! We should read her as a white woman who dared to fuck a man from another race, he said, or as a woman who dared to fuck someone who wasn’t a man at all. To which the other commenters replied, right, because she fucked a sea monster. Yes, the argument about the metaphor is convincing, but still, on the literal level, the sea monster is a wild animal—it eats the neighbor’s cat!—and this story is therefore pro-bestiality. But you have to forget the literal meaning!, the Shape of Water fan insisted. If you don’t, you’re taking the same stance as the sadistic security chief who serves as the villain of the movie! Why would you want to see the world through his eyes? Eventually this guy was deemed a troll and barred from further comment, but I think he raised an interesting point. Where is the line between, on the one hand, stories that function on both the literal and metaphorical level, and on the other, stories whose literal meaning is meant to be discarded? It’s hard not to conclude that, for this guy, the determining factor was political convenience: he so fervently believed in the thematic content that his response to the highly problematic literal content was to demand that everyone just throw it out.
The Death of Louis XIV
Tierry Lounas and Albert Serra, 2016
#26, 2017 Skandies
I don’t think I quite made it to the half-hour mark with this one. As I mention in many of these articles, I try to go into these movies knowing as little as possible about them, but when I start feeling like I want to bail, I do sometimes put the movie on pause and check out some reviews to see whether it’s going to be pretty much the same thing all the way through. Julia was an example of a movie that the reviews suggested that I stick with after a sluggish opening, and it did kick into gear a few minutes after I would otherwise have hit the eject button. But usually the reviews don’t mention any sudden twists, and in this case, they affirmed that this movie is indeed what it says on the box: two hours of a decrepit old man dying. It’s just that this decrepit old man was the archetype of an absolute monarch, so when he manages to laboriously swallow a spoonful of soft-boiled egg, there is a small crowd gathered around his bed to applaud and exclaim, “Bravo, sire!” Apparently the main idea behind this movie is that every frame was meant to reflect the look of paintings of the period. And, well… I love museums, but when I go to them, I do not spend two hours in the galleries full of paintings from 1715.
Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne, 2017
#20, 2017 Skandies
You sometimes hear about scripts being circulated around Hollywood years before they’re made, but the only one I ever heard about during my brief stint in the movie industry was this one. The premise, I was told, was that scientists develop a way to permanently shrink living creatures, to the point that an average human would end up the size of a G.I. Joe action figure—offering up the possibility of dramatically reducing humanity’s ecological footprint, and at the same time, offering a way to radically improve standards of living. (Imagine how much you’d save on your grocery bill if you’re eating 0.06% as much, or what your mortgage might look like if on your scale a standard bedroom is the size of a one-acre lot.) And now, all these years later, I get to the 2017 Skandies list, and check it out—that script was made into a real movie! And for once I wasn’t looking to head for the exits at the half-hour mark: the way the movie sets up the premise is compelling, and I liked all the Pattern 14 touches like the way people have to get their dental work extracted before getting downsized, because their fillings won’t shrink with them. So, yeah. We’re introduced to the premise. We’re introduced to our protagonists, a couple struggling to make ends meet. We see them decide to downsize, and follow them through the process. A twist: the wife chickens out, leaving the husband to find himself about to start a new life as a suddenly divorced man who’s five inches tall. There’s still about an hour and a half to go in the movie, so with the set-up complete, it’s time for the plot to get underway. A shame, that.
Because this is where what looked like it was going to be a great movie turns into a flop. The actual story of Downsizing is that the protagonist, having lost most of his net worth in the divorce settlement, has to get a job at a call center and move from the mansion he’d downsized for into an apartment complex. He gets to know his upstairs neighbor (played in typically annoying fashion by Christoph Waltz), and notices that one of the neighbor’s cleaning ladies is developing early-onset arthritis—he’d been a physical therapist prior to getting shrunk. She takes him for a doctor and insists that he accompany her to treat a friend of hers—at which point he discovers that the problems of the big world have reproduced themselves in the little one, as his affluent “micro-community”, a city the size of a parking lot, turns out to have a hidden micro-slum on the other side of the wall. The cleaning lady, who turns out to have once been an anti-government activist in her native Vietnam, browbeats the protagonist into helping her tend to the sick and the hungry.
Meanwhile, methane releases in Antarctica have accelerated the breakdown of the climate, to the point that conditions will soon be incompatible with human life. It turns out that the same scientists who came up with downsizing have created a downsized habitat underground where a small community of shrunken humans can survive for a few thousand years until conditions on the surface stabilize. The protagonist wants to join them, convinced that this is where the future of humanity lies, but the neighbor and the activist insist that this is stupid: the neighbor says that human flaws will doom the underground colony—“They’re all gonna go insane down there and kill each other”—while the activist maintains that if the future of humanity is underground, that just means that the surface is where people will need the most help. Her argument, plus the power of wuv—plus the fact that reaching the underground habitat requires an eleven-hour walk—convinces him to back out, and the denouement illustrates that he has made the right choice. Saving humankind, the filmmakers make clear, is not a matter of bold strokes like downsizing or underground colonies, but individual actions like bringing Olive Garden leftovers to an old man in need. The problem is, this is basically 100% wrong. Virtually all meaningful change comes as a result of collective action, not individual choices. Spreading the idea that we should focus on personal philanthropy is a rhetorical tactic designed to divert people from the arena of public policy, where real progress can be made. Want to help the aged out of poverty?, the film asks. Forget a bold stroke like creating Social Security—go volunteer at your church’s soup kitchen instead! Downsizing is a film Herbert Hoover would applaud.
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Kozue Kuroki, 2019