Show-me-time

Showtime has never made sense to me as a premium channel worth subscribing to (their only series that I followed all the way to the end was Nurse Jackie), but I do make note of films or series that seem worth watching, in order to take advantage of a month’s subscription (or free trial) when the channel presents something I really want to see – in this case, Ethan Hawke as John Brown in The Good Lord Bird, whose release had been delayed several times.  So here are a few hangovers from 2019 films that I wasn’t able to see elsewhere, and a few other shows I watched while I had the chance.

Hustlers (MC-79) is a based-on-fact caper film about high-end NYC strippers, made by and to some extent for women.  Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, and featuring a powerhouse performance by Jennifer Lopez, it begins just before the financial meltdown of 2008, when the strippers are making a decent living catering to the whims of money managers.  After the fall, the wolves of Wall Street get shorn by sheep, as the women develop a scheme to fleece the predators in turn.  The film moves fast, but doesn’t go anyplace in particular, making gestures toward sisterhood is powerful, and motherhood as madness, but coming down firmly in the realm of shopping equals bliss. 

Since GLOW I’ve taken an interest in Marc Maron, which is cemented by Sword of Trust (MC-70), where he plays an Alabama pawn shop owner who comes into possession of an old sword with accompanying “documentation” that “proves” that the South won the Civil War.  As such, it is considered highly collectable by a certain sort, and with his spacey assistant and the lesbian couple who brought him the sword, they fall into a rabbit hole of unreconstructed Confederate white supremacists.  Written and directed by Lynn Shelton, the film is offbeat, deadpan, improvisational, and absurd, but also quite moving at times, not least in an intimate scene between Maron and Shelton herself.  They had been junkies together, but he got sober while she backslid; he clearly still loves her, but has to fend off the lure of the world they shared.  Maron and Shelton were in a personal and professional relationship themselves, which was cut off by her sudden death from a blood ailment in May of this year.  They would have been certain to do more great things together.

Reviewing Shelton’s filmography, I caught up with one that I had missed, Outside In (2018, MC-76, NFX). I’m glad I did, and sad there won’t be more.  Before Maron, she was known for her work with the Duplass brothers, and she wrote this with Jay, who also stars, as a man-child just released from twenty years in prison for a teenage crime that he didn’t actually commit.  I can’t believe they weren’t inspired by the superlative television series Rectify, though they have their own angle on the story.  Edie Falco delivers her usual insight, humor, and feeling in the role of Duplass’ high school English teacher, who crusaded for his release and sustained him throughout his sentence.  Understandably, he fell in love with her.  And understandably, with her unappreciative lout of a husband, she is inclined to accept his attentions.  Her teen daughter is played by the reliably great Kaitlyn Dever, who also forms a relationship with Duplass.  The setting is a small town in Washington state, where it is nearly always raining.  Every aspect of the film reeks of modest lives and plain truth.  Edie Falco’s glinting eye and twisted smile make the proceedings quite endearing, recommendation enough for those in the know.  Now back to Showtime offerings.

Painter Julian Schnabel may be arty and self-indulgent as a director, but he has made a number of high-quality films, and At Eternity’s Gate (MC-76) is another.  There have been many biopics about Van Gogh, but this is a worthy and novel addition, distinguished above all by Willem Dafoe’s poignant and highly believable portrayal of the artist.  More impressionistic than factual, the film successfully inhabits the mind and milieu of the painter in the last two years of his life.  It has a star-studded supporting cast, led by Oscar Isaac as Gauguin.  There are off-putting elements in Schnabel’s film, but overall it succeeds in his aim to show “what it is to be an artist.”  If I were still programming films at the Clark, this would be a natural to show and discuss.

A new film I’d been looking for just turned up unexpectedly on Showtime, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (MC-89).  With films like Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and Certain Women, she has certainly established herself as one the most distinctive American independent filmmakers working today.  There’s no mistaking a Reichardt film, even when she doesn’t resort to the old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio, and First Cow may be the most Kelly yet, as she achieves what I can only call an overflowing minimalism – slow-paced, enigmatic, folktale-like yet palpably real.  Her penetration of the mythic West called to mind one of my all-time favorites McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in this depiction of 1820s Oregon, where beaver pelts are known as “soft gold” and draw a diversity of immigrants – British, American, Chinese, and Russian – to overrun the native tribes.  One is gentle-souled Cookie to a band of brutish trappers, having been orphaned and indentured to a baker back east.  Another is a Chinaman who has been everywhere and seen everything, at least in his own head.  (John Magaro and Orion Lee are excellently matched as such, and Toby Jones plays the British overlord of the frontier fort, and owner of the eponymous cow.)  They find and re-find each other in the wilderness, to affirm the message of the William Blake proverb that begins the film: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”  As usual, Reichardt is in collaboration here with the writer Jonathan Raymond, and filming on her home turf, but she has mastered the art of making the personal political, as well as appealing, and even humorous in a downbeat, deadpan manner.

The primary referent for Daisy Haggard’s Back to Life (MC-87) is Fleabag, but there are also elements of Rectify (again) and a Masterpiece Mystery like Flesh and Blood, plus a parody of various true crime serials, which means it has many points of interest but is perhaps too diffuse in focus for its six half-hour episodes, and not a promising set-up for future seasons.  Haggard effectively plays a woman who has spent half her life in prison after a teenage incident, returning to her seaside town to live with her nervous and quirky parents and to absorb the fear and antagonism of the community.  If you have a taste for contemporary British comedy, this is definitely worth a look, but not something to go out of your way for.

Which brings us to The Good Lord Bird (MC-84), which I did go out of my way for, because it traffics in the period of history with which I have been obsessed for decades, America between 1840 and 1860.  There’s a lot to be admired in this 7-part series starring the estimable Ethan Hawke as John Brown, but I also have some quibbles, shared with the highly-praised source novel.  The series seems more respectful of James McBride’s book and voice, than of any of the characters depicted (aside from Harriet Tubman).  Daveed Diggs’s Frederick Douglass is an energetic and canny caricature, like his Lafayette/Jefferson in Hamilton.  (At this moment I am almost 600 pages into David Blight’s award-winning biography of Douglass.)  Hawke as Brown is comically insane as well as authentically prophetic, but always carrying complete conviction, the actor as well as the historical character.  This makes a career-capping role for Hawke – to go with his writing and producing credits – as the most accomplished actor of his generation (a claim I’m inclined to back up in a future essay).  Joshua Caleb Johnson is also good in his debut, as the slave boy converted by Brown into a freed girl and surrogate daughter, as well as narrator of book and film.  Though I found the tone somewhat elusive and the history just a bit evasive, this series is handsomely mounted and effectively irreverent in its depiction of antebellum America.  So I’m inclined to credit the opening claim of each episode “All of this is true.  Most of it happened.”  It’s not the last word on John Brown, but an honest portrait of a still-controversial and nearly incomprehensible figure.  Lunatic or visionary, terrorist or freedom fighter, all of the above?  It’s still up for debate.