British family affairs

The Crown (MC-85, NFX) in its fourth season remains an intoxicating mix of history, spectacle, and soap opera.  Though I watched with a subscriber to Majesty magazine – which circulates among her sisters and nieces – and had her at hand for character ID and fact-checking, I did not go into this series with any great antecedent interest in the Windsors et al.  And that despite the fact one of the earliest Christmas presents I can remember receiving was a replica of Elizabeth’s coronation carriage, from my English mother or maybe her mother, long before I got the Roy Rogers’ chuckwagon I really wanted.  Nonetheless, intelligent writing from Peter Morgan, sumptuous production, and outstanding acting have kept me riveted through four seasons.  This season splits the focus between Princess Di, whom I always considered a vapid celebrity, and Margaret Thatcher, always a political monster to me.  In the respective performances of Emma Corrin and Gillian Anderson, however, I found them objects of fascination and perhaps even understanding.  The marvelous Olivia Colman continues as the Queen, passing the baton from Claire Foy along to Imelda Staunton in the forthcoming final two seasons, a truly royal succession.  I’m also eager to see Helena Bonham Carter yield to Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret.  Can’t imagine anyone but Josh O’Connor as sorehead Prince Charles, and it’s still a shock to see him elsewhere, wrestling naked in the mud with another man in a Yorkshire sheepfold, or taking the pulpit as one of Jane Austen’s comically pompous parsons.  Lots of good performances from lesser aristos, and even commoners as well.  Come for the scandal, stay for the history, leave with amused empathy for the poor royals, trapped within their gilded privilege.  I won’t anoint this series with my all-time top ten ranking until it’s complete, but it seems a lock at this point.

As a longtime fan of Nick Hornby, I came in a roundabout way to a week’s free trial of Sundance Now, in order to watch State of the Union (MC-81).  In an interview, he mentioned taking inspiration from High Maintenance to break out of the half-hour or hour-long tv box, and deciding to do a series of ten ten-minute episodes.  In each, a troubled pair meet in a pub for a drink before going in for marital therapy, he a pint of Pride, she a dry white wine .  We never follow them into the session, but in the next week’s pub meeting we find out what happened in the intervening time.  The couple is played by Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike and they are outstanding, individually and in tandem.  They make the most of Hornby’s dialogue, and then some.  Despite its provenance and limited setting, this 100-minute series directed by Stephen Frears makes perfect sense as a movie, and ranks with the best of mature romantic comedies.

In the interests of self-understanding, I look for films, documentaries, or shows that highlight the issues of autism, so when the recent third season of The A Word (MC-76, AMZ) generated comment, I was drawn into the first season, from 2016.  Like In Treatment, this is an outstanding adaptation of an Israeli tv series that takes serious interest in human psychology.  Set in the picturesque English Lake District, it’s an hour-long family drama, with excellent writing and acting all round, and a strong streak of humor in the behavior of an extended dysfunctional family.  Almost all the actors and creators were new to me, so I won’t bother to list names, except to affirm that the ensemble is impeccable.  I’ll have more to say after I watch seasons 2 and 3 (six episodes each), but I want to enter an early recommendation on the record.  I’m not sure how they drew out the performance of the 5-year-old autistic boy, but it is remarkably convincing.  His parents are initially deep in denial about his condition, and about the whole family’s communication problems.  There’s a clueless, recently widowed grandfather; a sweet and sympathetic teenage sister; and an aunt and uncle who’ve moved in next door with their own set of marital and career difficulties.  The family business is a brewery, and the son-in-law is branching out into a rustic gastropub.  The landscape and the village characters round out the appeal of this series, but for me truthfulness was the defining characteristic, sometimes unflattering but always compassionate and perceptive.  Will have more to say when I get through further seasons. 

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.

 

Docs advice

Feeling a little wan and anxious, maybe suffering from a truth-deficiency? Not getting enough fact and truth in your media diet?  I’m here to affirm to you that documentaries worthy of the name enable an encounter with realities that would otherwise fall outside one’s ken.  Melding entertainment and education in the broadest sense of each term, nonfiction films are a vehicle for learning, but moreover a vehicle for seeing and feeling.  Here are a number of genuine examples of Grierson’s originating definition of “documentary film” – “the creative treatment of actuality.”

If Frederick Wiseman were not still around at the age of 90, having just brought out another acclaimed film (City Hall, specifically Boston’s), Steve James would be easy to cite as the greatest American documentarian working today.  His latest is City So Real (MC-93, Hulu), a five-part series that follows the 2019 election for mayor of Chicago, as 14 candidates make the ballot to vie for the Democratic nomination, after Rahm Emanuel declines to run for a third term.  The surprise winner (which will I will not spoil, in case you happen not to be up on Midwestern urban politics) is then confronted in the final episode by 2020’s overlapping crises of pandemic and racial unrest.  The variety of candidates offers entry into a wide range of situations and institutions, and Steve James, as a longtime Chicagoan, nods to its reputation as a city of neighborhoods by beginning each scene with a map of the city, highlighting the name and location of the neighborhood depicted.  So this is a vast yet intimate canvas(s) of the city.  I’m not going to describe any of the characters or twists of the story, but urge you to follow along as the pageant unfolds, through campaign events and church services, board room meetings and street actions, bars and barbershops, door-to-door encounters and penthouse salons.  Beyond astute sociological analysis (and humor!), this series offers a parable of democracy in action.  There is no better bard of Chicago than James, from his groundbreaking Hoop Dreams through The Interrupters and Life Itself to his previous outstanding tv series, America to Me, all of which I urgently recommend.  Even when he wanders away to NYC’s Chinatown for the postscript to the 2008 financial meltdown, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, you are guaranteed a viewing experience that will make you feel as well as learn.  Steve James is a filmmaker to watch.

Reviewing his filmography, I noticed one I had missed, done for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.  No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson (2010) may be James’s most personal film (though Stevie is another example),  James uses the first-person approach to dig deep into the racial divides of his hometown, Hampton VA, where high school hoops star A.I. was thrown in jail after a bowling alley brawl with whites.  The case drew national attention and eventually led to clemency from the governor, and Iverson went on to stardom at Georgetown and in the NBA.  But two decades later, the divisive spectacle still rankles on both sides of Hampton’s color line.  James’ father was a big Iverson fan, but his mother supported the hoopster’s conviction and sentence (15 years! though eligible for parole in 10 months).  The story is old, but the resonance is oh-so-contemporary.

Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me (MC-87, AMZ) is not exactly a one-woman show or a documentary, but a Tony- and Pulitzer- nominated play that has been filmed by the suddenly ubiquitous Marielle Heller.  Whom I’m reminded of most, and this constitutes high praise, is Hannah Gadsby, as Schreck combines personal experience and energetic humor into an honest and trenchant lecture on political and social concerns.  As a 15-year-old Schreck had earned scholarship money by going around to American Legion halls and competing for speeches on the title topic.  Decades later, she jumps off from her teenage words into personal and constitutional history, and the interweavings thereof.  Discussing the 9^th and 14^th amendments in detail, she covers issues like citizenship and immigration, women’s rights and domestic abuse.  Near the end, she brings in other voices, a gay man and two teenage black girls, to debate whether the constitution should be retained and amended, or rewritten from scratch, a proposition on which the audience then votes.  The whole thing is educational, funny, and even moving.

Strictly for a special taste and history, which I confess to sharing, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (MC-68, AMZ) was a rare delicacy, like that Japanese fish that can kill you if you’re not careful.  A movie about a film critic, who’d-a thunk it?  But in her 24-year tenure in that role at The New Yorker, Kael was a cultural force to be reckoned with.  For me personally, most often adversarily.  I tended to stand with the Stanley Kauffmanns and John Simons of this small world.  Even Andrew Sarris made more sense.  But Pauline Kael was provocative, a sharp blade to parry with.  Living in NYC in the mid-70s, I’d rush home from a new movie, to pick up her review and argue with it into the night, pricked by her misguided but well-articulated views.  So Rob Garver’s documentary was for me a warm bath of cinephiliac nostalgia, with maybe a shard of broken wineglass in the tub.  I enjoyed seeing all the talking heads, familiar faces and those I could finally put to a byline, but especially I liked the constant stream of very short clips from films, which illustrated or commented upon the intervening dialogue, while providing a pop-quiz mini-history of cinema during Kael’s reign.  (It put me in mind of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour compilation of film clips, in each of which a clock appears exactly matching the viewer’s time; as a museum installation, you’re free to wander in and out, take a soft seat, and watch time pass by, while also taking a trip down cinematic memory lane.)

 
Anyway, one of my pandemic lockdown projects was to go through my shelves of film books, and among those I set aside for future donation to the local library’s second-hand bookstore, was a shelf of critics’ compilations – Kael, Kauffmann, Simon, and all but a select few volumes.  I did keep two Library of America anthologies, American Movie Critics edited by Philip Lopate (he’s in the doc), and a Kael selection called The Age of Movies.  Too bad these old reviews are not searchable online, but it’s unfeasibly cumbersome to find the relevant volume, then look in the index, then flip to the review, after one has been spoiled by finding any wanted text with a few clicks.  And frankly, by now I’m mostly interested in formulating and expressing my own opinion about films rather than arguing with someone else’s.  I still enjoy the simulated conversation of checking Metacritic or MRQE reviews, but usually after I’ve written my own, having checked facts and credits on Wikipedia.

Lately I’ve developed a non-culinary fascination with mushrooms, finding and photographing striking examples.  I’m currently reading a highly entertaining and informative book called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, so I was anxious enough to see Fantastic Fungi (MC-70, Vudu) to actually pay-per-view (only $5, or $1.67 each for three viewers), even though it will probably soon join the rest of Louie Schwartzberg’s “Moving Art” series on Netflix.  I loved the time-lapse sequences of growing mushrooms, and much of the animation was illuminating (though as frequently the case with nature documentaries, I wish they labeled the film speed or means of illustration).  But after the halfway point, the film takes a bit of a turn from the scientific (and pictorial) to woo-woo speculations about the anthropology of magic mushrooms and the resumption of psychedelic research as the war on drugs wanes.  Some nice kaleidoscopic mandala sequences to go with the white coats from Johns Hopkins.  But it’s hard not to come away with some belief in mushrooms as the salvation of earth and its humans, or at least partners in their survival.