This is a movie about a young woman who graduates from an all-girls Catholic school in Sacramento in the early 2000s and heads off to college in New York, written and directed by a woman who graduated from an all-girls Catholic school in Sacramento in the early 2000s and headed off to college in New York. The last Greta Gerwig movie I saw, Frances Ha, was about a young woman from Sacramento who was now trying to make it in New York. It seems that no one has to impart the wisdom of writing what you know to Greta Gerwig. But while a story might be interesting to you purely on the basis that it is your story, that doesn’t necessarily make it interesting to anyone else, and this struck me as a fairly generic tale of a girl’s senior year of high school. These come in a few different flavors, and this is the kind inflected by adult retrospect, as the title character is kind of a twerp and her story arc culminates in her realizing this and feeling apologetic about it. Obviously, a lot of us are twerps as adolescents, and Lady Bird’s twerpy behavior is well within the realm of the forgivable: she mouths off to parents who, while far from perfect, are doing their best; she abandons her bestie to try to run with a more popular crowd; she goes to some lengths to try to carve out a memorable identity for herself (complete with self-applied nickname, à la George Costanza and “T‑Bone”), but then radically revises her personality to try to win the favor of boys even twerpier than she is. The boys, the friends, the parents, and the other characters are reasonably well drawn for the sort of thing this is: they show some nuance in their few minutes of screen time, but still, only Lady Bird herself and maybe her mom actually get more than those few minutes of screen time, so the portraits are more suggestive than deep. And, well, when I linked the article above I discovered that one of the things I had written about Frances Ha was that “the scenes are jammed with fun little moments that mercifully avoid ‘quirky’ territory”. Lady Bird is not nearly so merciful in this regard.
A fairly prominent theme in the movie is Lady Bird’s desire to get out of Sacramento; one of the nuns counters that Lady Bird’s writing reveals a deep love for the city, which is clearly meant to apply to the film as well. I wish that had gone beyond a handful of montages, though. For what clearly aspires to be a Pattern 24 movie, the geographical and chronological grounding of this story is fairly shallow. It could be transplanted to any number of times and places without really losing much of anything.
Well, following up Lady Bird with this one makes for a tonally inconsistent double feature, I tell ya whut.
When I first got into the movie business, I was instructed to read a book by David Mamet in which he declares, “People have tried for centuries to use drama to change people’s lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn’t work. It might be nice if it worked for those things, but it doesn’t. The only thing the dramatic form is good for is telling a story.” He is wrong about this, as he is wrong about nearly everything, but the book was valuable in baldly articulating a vision of storytelling as an empty mechanical exercise. Mamet says flat out that a storyteller’s role is to introduce a protagonist, preferably a total cipher to encourage audience identification, and immediately establish that the protagonist wants something. The only thing an audience ever cares about, he maintains, is what will happen next, and specifically, whether the protagonist will get that thing. He contends that this is what we’re wired for—that people going to the movies are just a modern equivalent of hunter-gatherers sitting around a campfire twenty thousand years ago telling stories about how the day went, and that therefore modern storytellers should endeavor to keep their stories just as primitive.
And if you’re looking for primitive, is this ever the movie for you. It’s pure amygdalar cinema. The way amygdalar cinema works is to establish that the baddie has done such grievous harm to the protagonist that any amount of payback, no matter how gruesome, is not only justified but worthy of celebration—so let go of your reservations and relish the carnage, audience! So what is a grindhouse gorefest doing at #11 on this list—and with a score of over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, lest we prematurely conclude that the Skandies voters are idiosyncratic? Well, I gotta admit, it is very well made for what it is. I remember that one script I worked on had a bit in it that I kept fighting to improve: why does the secondary villain do X, Y, and Z? Because the Big Bad of the movie has taken his family hostage. That seemed clichéd to me, and the script never even established the family in the first place—it was something that got revealed out of nowhere. Brawl in Cell Block 99, on the other hand, comes up with a version of “taking the family hostage” that is darkly memorable—the Big Bad threatens to have the protagonist’s daughter mutilated in such a horrific way that even to mention it is probably enough for most viewers to drop their qualms about any fate that villain might meet. The challenge the protagonist Bradley Thomas faces in order to prevent the mutilation is a hell of a premise, too: he’s been sentenced to seven years in a medium-security prison, and the villain’s henchman tells him that to save his daughter, he must kill one of the villain’s enemies, who is also in prison. The problem is, he’s in a different prison! So it is left to Bradley to come up with a way to get transferred to maximum security (which, in turn, entails abandoning any hope of release within his lifetime). Even the way the protagonist is established involves some clever threading of a needle. Again, this is amygdalar cinema, so the audience needs to believe that bloody vengeance is sure to be wrought upon the baddies. That means that Bradley needs to be established as prone to violence. In fact, since the plot requires that he wind up in prison, and that the story not be derailed by questions of guilt or innocence, he needs to be established as a violent criminal. How to make such a character sympathetic? The movie’s solution: have him get fired, then come home to discover that his wife has been having an affair. He instructs her to wait for him in the living room… and then rips her car apart with his bare hands. At which point he goes inside and they have a calm discussion about how to save their marriage. I have it on good authority that having the family patriarch resort to property damage every time he gets angry does not actually result in a harmonious household, but still, it’s a memorable way to convey who this guy is. He’s not a good guy—he’s not even as good a guy as the Punisher, who is a murderer but restricts himself to killing criminals, while Bradley works as muscle for a local drug dealer—but he doesn’t beat or even yell at his wife, and demonstrates enough self-control to first channel his rage and then quell it entirely. He’s not a loose cannon. Yet we can anticipate that he can take apart anyone in his way the same way he takes apart the car.
Mamet also talks a lot about whittling dialogue down to the bare minimum, and again, this was a maxim that was imparted to me as well. The ideal moment of exposition, I was told, came from a movie I haven’t seen called Escape from Alcatraz: “What was your childhood like?” “Short.” Brawl in Cell Block 99 aims for that kind of dialogue, and there are plenty of memorable quips, but I kept having the thought, “That probably worked better on the page than spoken aloud.” The thing is, I kept visualizing the screenplay page, seeing the line of dialogue in 12‑point Courier, and thinking, “Wow! What a great line!” even as the line was not really working for me on the audio track. Weird cognitive dissonance. Much like admiring the craft while thinking, “A movie about the catharsis of scraping people’s faces off is not really for me.”
Though I think there is also a little something to be said for the way the movie offers up multiple mentions of Amnesty International and “that prison in Austria”—though I think the reference it’s aiming for is to famously humane Halden Prison in Norway. Either way, though, the point is to position American prisons as far below a civilized standard, which, by extension, positions the U.S. as below the standard of a civilized nation. For that matter, so does the disordering incident that kicks off the movie: when Bradley loses his job as a tow truck driver, not for anything he’s done but simply because of the region’s wintry economic climate, he finds himself in a country that does such a poor job matching its citizens up with work that needs to be done that the only prospect he can see for himself is to return to organized crime. Now, maybe most of the audience likes that American prisons are much worse than Scandinavian ones at knocking down the recidivism rate (“It’s jail, not Yale!”), or that the American economic system does little or nothing to harness the skills of its workforce (“No ‘nanny state’!”). But perhaps the movie at least gets folks thinking about these sorts of issues. Or, wait, no it doesn’t. David Mamet assures me that stories can’t do that!
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