I've been thinking about films that got a reaction out of me this year.
I’ve seen several of the films nominated for this year’s Academy Awards, really loved two of them, liked many of the others, thought one of them a disappointment, and one the worst film I’ve seen this year. I found it noteworthy that three of the best films I saw, two nominees and one which should have been nominated, had at their center gender fluid characters. Unlike the culture wars over gender rights and disapprovals that paint with broad brushes, each of these focused on an individual.
Maybe art knows what religion and politics too often forget: we’re not just talking about "issues," we’re talking about individual human beings. In these three films, religious and political debates take a back seat as we’re invited to explore the complex, flawed people cast into roles none of them is prepared for.
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WILL AND HARPER
Will and Harper was not nominated in the documentary category, but it was one of my unavoidable favorite films this year. The writer Andrew Steele met Will Farrell in 1995 when both began working at Saturday Night Live and formed a friendship that continued well beyond their SNL years. In 2021 Farrell received an email from his friend explaining that he had transitioned and was no longer Andrew; he was now Harper Steele.
They decide to take a road trip to solidify their new relationship and to test those they encounter with Will’s celebrity embrace of a trans woman who identifies herself as such at every stop. The most interesting and tense stops are in redneck bars in Oklahoma and Texas, where Farrell’s fame attracts crowds to whom Harper then introduces herself as trans. These gatherings are surprising in the unpredictable responses they elicit, well beyond the flat-out rejection I anticipated.
In the end, this documentary is a love story. Will is able to absorb the pain Harper has lived with, including some caused by Will’s insensitivities when his fame exposes Harper in these hostile environments. There is nothing saccharine about their new relationship, which makes its depth so authentic and easy to believe in.
EMILIA PEREZ
The opening ten minutes of this film grabbed my attention and didn’t loosen its grip for two hours. Song and dance scenes emerge in unexpected moments, one such in a large surgical suite where patients are undergoing various gender-altering operations. As macabre as this sounds, the musical scenes work as part of the story and drive the development of the characters and their complex emerging relationships.
The main characters are so fully developed that I had deep interest in how each of them reacted to startling new circumstances and hoped against hope that all four would thrive. But above the acting, what captivated me was the story: the deep, loving, and eventually lethally hostile relationships between these four; the danger and violence kept present by the eerie background music; the history of Mexico’s missing children who were kidnapped and killed by Emelia’s cartel (I don’t want to spoil any more of the plot for you); and the ever-present urban poverty set against the enormous wealth generated by the drug trade.
In its final thirty minutes the story becomes as ancient and predictable as Agamemnon’s gathering of an army to rescue the kidnapped Helen of Troy in The Iliad. Despite this disappointment, EMILIA PEREZ is the best movie I’ve seen in the past year.
CONCLAVE
When I was in high school I remember sitting during lunch with friends, two of them Roman Catholics, in the otherwise empty bleachers beside our football field. At some point a puff of white smoke came out of the vent over the school cafeteria and one of my Catholic friends stood in mock wonder, his arms raised to heaven, and shouted Habemus Papam! Habemus Papam! I had no idea this was a Latin phrase, I simply thought he’d gone nuts for a moment. When he sat down laughing, he told us, When white smoke comes out the Vatican chimney it means the Cardinals have elected a new pope.
That gathering of Cardinals is the setting for this absorbing movie. Ralph Fiennes and the always wonderful Stanley Tucci stand out in an all-around first-rate cast. Isabella Rossellini represents all the nuns who do the hard work of making the cardinals’ pomp and splendor possible. The women serve, the men pontificate.
Though I liked this film a lot, there was a deep disappointment. I never like films or plays or novels when an unearned surprise is sprung at the end that pretends to resolve the several conflicts raised in the body of the work. Cheap tricks, I think.
Here, the church winds up in a position that is atypically progressive without ever facing and intentionally altering its rigid doctrine and practice, especially around sexual issues. Perhaps the producers of this film realized that only an accident could create such openness, since there’s little evidence that the Roman church is ready to act out in the open to shed its monarchical, patriarchal history.
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
If Emilia Perez was the best film I’ve seen this year, A Complete Unknown was my favorite film, for very personal reasons. When our son Brendan was fifteen, I gave him an acoustic guitar for Christmas; I played enough chords to sing simple songs for myself and wanted to share that experience with him. He became a talented musician and spent the next twenty years writing, singing, and playing with various bands he created in clubs and bars around Los Angeles and occasionally in San Francisco and New York. In his thirties, he once said to me, I can’t imagine my life without Bob Dylan. So he and I had to see A Complete Unknown, tracing the earliest years of Dylan’s career.
Familiar characters could be played in stereotype but are instead original and nuanced. The two lead actors do their own singing. Timothy Chalamet actually has a better voice than Dylan (not a high bar), and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez has her same pure high soprano. Their duets are like a time warp back to when we saw Bob and Joan sing together for a decade or more. For me there was not a false note in any of the characters, from Johnny Cash and various Black folk singers to the producers and agents who surrounded Dylan like flies at a picnic.
The star of the film is the music. It includes songs written in Minnesota before Dylan got to Greenwich Village, and at least two dozen songs that most of the people in the theater could have sung along with. Dylan’s music, especially his lyrics, are a narrative of those years in the lives of those of us old enough to have heard it when it first came out.
WICKED
I tried. After seeing Wicked on the stage years ago and leaving at intermission, I thought maybe the film would win me over. I looked for things to like in it. From her first song, I recognized the bright, pure sound of Ariana Grande’s voice. Cynthia Erivo’s strong presence grabbed me. Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard is an emasculated emperor of a fantastical kingdom.
But that was about the end of it for me. The sets throughout were terrible overkill: even the yellow brick road was a CGI experiment in changing colors. But I think my biggest problem was with the story. The original 1939 Wizard of Oz was about a young girl and the imaginary friends and adventures created in her mind after she bumps her head during a storm. It is also a parable of continuing on (follow the yellow brick road) set in the depths of the Great Depression when giving up and giving in were available options. The sets and characters – monkeys and Munchkins among them – clearly emerge from the mind of a child, and the wizard is that character kids are always afraid is hiding under the bed. It is a story about children’s imaginations.
Wicked and its shallow young adults were no match for a heartless tin man, a cowardly lion, and a scarecrow without a brain, nor were doe-eyed Galinda and the Green Witch Alphaba in any way as captivating as that little girl in her red slippers.
ANORA
This was the worst film I’ve seen this year. Not only the worst Academy-nominated film, but the worst film, period.
I watched it after a word of caution from our son whose aesthetics are much like mine and who walked out on this film after twenty minutes. I made it past the twenty-minute mark, but barely; in that time, I’d seen more repetitious, soulless sex than in all the other films I saw this year.
If you haven't seen it, don't waste your time - this monotonous romp between the 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch (living lavishly off his father’s wealth) and a 23-year-old professional lap dancer is – as sex seldom is for me – mind-numbingly boring. Mikey Madison’s acting throughout is the film’s one strength, but hardly enough to rescue even these endless salacious scenes.
If the film is trying to make a point, it fails; the sex drags on as do the car chases and party scenes. At its deepest level this film felt immoral - not because of the sex, but because it trivialized serious questions without the depth they deserved. Maybe a vigorous edit would have saved this story, but in its current form, it was so thin and predictable that the director had to stretch out the small plot lines into countless similar scenes to fill the two hours of what could have been a much shorter (though no less weak) film. I'm still incensed about how bad and lazy this movie was.
I suppose the old saying is true: there’s no such thing as a useless film; it can always serve as a bad example.