Women in difficulty

If the downside of Fleabag’s legacy is endless reiterations of dissipation and disintegration by thirtysomething women, the upside lies in its example of young-ish women writing about the complexities of their own experience to create nuanced roles for themselves.  Much better to have women talking about their own difficulties, rather than male-directed “woman in jeopardy” flicks.  Here are some good examples.
 
Saint Frances (MC-83, Kanopy) is definitely Kelly O’Sullivan’s show, though nicely framed by first-time director Alex Thompson.  She’s a 34-year-old waitress wondering where the promise of her youth went, when she stumbles into a job as nanny to a highly-perceptive 6-year-old with two mommies and a newborn brother.  As Franny, the title character, Ramona Edith-Williams is very winning.  Ms. O’Sullivan’s writing is witty and observant, and her performance put me in mind of Brie Larson, which is high praise.  The two make an endearing pair, without ever turning saccharine.  The cringe factor is supplied by multiple blood leakings, rather than by drink and drugs.  And the whole package is delivered with a sense of low-key truthfulness.
 
Herself (MC-71, AMZ) is an Amazon import from Ireland, written by and starring Clare Dunne, as a battered wife who has tenuously escaped with two young daughters from her violent husband.  Some welfare agency is putting them up in an airport hotel, but the father retains visitation rights even under his own restraining order.  If the script tries to work in too many twists (perhaps because of additional writers), instead of digging deeper into the reality of the situation, it certainly serves as an effective calling card for Ms. Dunne as a versatile actress. The supporting cast is fine, led by Harriet Walter.  I felt a bit manipulated, but nonetheless was moved.  Director Phyllida Lloyd is no Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, but this film does contain truths about real lives in distress, despite third-act piling on.
 
In South Mountain (MC-79, AMZ), the protagonist is somewhat older and her problem is the familiar one, a cheating husband.  But there’s a lot more going on, and this film leaks it out artfully, in an aura of modest realism that accumulates real power.  Talia Balsam gives a watchful but revealing performance in the lead, an art teacher at a community college in the Catskills.  The story, written and directed by Hilary Brougher, is told in essentially one location, on a handful of days over the course of one summer.  The dissolving couple has two daughters, and the family is interwoven with a neighboring single mother with two teen kids of her own.  The area is attractively evoked with “pillow shots” of a nearby falls and the titular mountain.  For a patient and attentive viewer, this is a hidden gem.
 
Once I started commenting on films under this heading, I began to realize how many movies fit the rubric.  And Babyteeth (MC-77, Hulu), winner of nine Australian Academy Awards, is one of the best.  In this case the women in difficulty are a 16-year-old with cancer, and her mother.  Eliza Scanlen is the girl, Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn the parents.  This is the first feature for director Shannon Murphy, adapted by Rita Kalnejais from her own play.  The film is a sequence of captioned vignettes, which tell the story with a pleasing obliqueness, relying on the viewer to pay attention and make the narrative leaps.  The Sydney setting is mainly the swank modern house of the family, the father a psychiatrist and the mother a professional pianist.  Their issues are confronted with indirection, by themselves and by the filmmakers.  The catalyst comes from the sudden crush the private-girls-school student develops for a classic bad boy, a 23-year-old homeless drug dealer (Toby Wallace).  The less you know about where this all goes, the more striking will be the film’s elliptical approach.  The performances are all stellar, the story powerful, and the visuals sublime.  I went into this film with little expectation, but came out numbering it among my best of 2020.

Elizabeth is Missing (MC-86, PBS) stretches this elastic category in another direction, toward dementia.  Glenda Jackson returns to acting after more than twenty years as a Labour MP, to play an 84-year-old woman who needs post-it notes and wall labels to remember from one moment to the next, but manages to delve into deep memory to unfold some mysteries from the past.  The mystery aspect is not especially satisfying, but Glenda Jackson’s portrait of the flickerings and emotions of Alzheimer’s is enlightening and affecting.
 

Ammonite (MC-73, AMZ) has met with a highly divided response (Metacritic scores range from 100 to 45), but I have to recuse myself from adjudicating.  This was a film I wanted to see from the moment I heard it was being shot.  I was bound to immerse myself in Francis Lee’s film, since I am so familiar with its locations, from a visit to Lyme Regis three years ago.  And how can you go wrong with passionate sex scenes between Kate Winslet and Saiorse Ronan?  So I was pre-sold, and not at all disappointed with the result.  Some compare the film unfavorably, in the vein of period lesbian romance, to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but it’s very much its own thing, a study in grey and blue, mist and mud, except for the occasional candle flame.  The film starts in the renowned “Ammonite graveyard,” with Kate digging into the role of Mary Anning, the amateur (in the best sense) paleontologist whose fossil finds made the “Jurassic Coast” a tourist destination from the early 19^th century on.  Saiorse is the ailing wife of one of those aristocratic tourists, who gets left in the care of the recessive and reluctant Kate/Mary, bringing a bit of blond sunlight into her drab, dirty, bedraggled life.  We never really crack the rock to reveal the Mary within, but Kate’s silences speak volumes about buried feelings, about loneliness and passion, about attraction and repulsion, about love and vocation.  The sense of period and place, class and gender, is wonderfully rendered, though the story speculates freely about the relationship between two actual longtime friends.  But what a treat to walk out the Cobb again, and down the beach under the Blue Lias cliffs!
 
One last film to close out this heading:  I’m not going to send you off in search of Eternal Beauty (MC-71, Kanopy), but personally I was glad to see it.  Ever since Happy-Go-Lucky, I’ve followed all of Sally Hawkins’ work, and I have a particular interest in films about mental illness, having worked on a book with a friend who was for many years a psychiatric nurse on a locked ward.  In Craig Roberts’ intimate and knowing film, Hawkins plays a schizophrenic woman, and like her, the viewer has a hard time sorting out what is real and what is hallucination.  It’s disorienting, but then that’s the point, innit?  Without underlining its themes, the film illustrates two truths, first that the “crazy” person is often the one acting out general family dysfunction, and second that from within the psyche of the sufferer, schizophrenia often seems like a liberating superpower.  The supporting cast is fine, but Sally is the show here, in a range from depression to mania.

Stevie watches too much TV

But so much of it is so good!  And here I review a few new shows, and then compile my list of the best television series of 2020 in comparison to the Metacritic compilation of TV critic top ten lists.
 
Recently released and coming in at #10 on that tally is How To with John Wilson (MC-83, HBO), a pick I heartily endorse.  If you’re a fan of quirky observational comedy, you will love this.  If you love New York, you will love this.  If you can appreciate wandering personal essays laced with a running visual counterpoint that doubles the humor, then you will love this.  John Wilson, at least as self-portrayed, is an Aspergerish obsessive, who uses his camera as shield from and outreach to the world, recording endless hours of street documentary, then compiling snippets of visual puns and commentary to accompany off-beat how-to themes that exfoliate into weird and wonderful blossoms of narrative.  I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen anything quite like this, and therefore I recommend starting with the outstanding Episode 2: “How to put up scaffolding.”  If you like that, go through the others in order, and expect a real kicker in Episode 6: “How to cook the perfect risotto.”  

(Nathan Fielder’s producing credit here led me to his own Comedy Central series from 2013-17, Nathan for You (MC-??, Hulu), in which he inveigles small businesses to take his marketing advice, and then films the fallout.  Start with Sn1:Ep2 to establish the premise, then watch one of the 32 episodes anytime you want a laugh and have 22 minutes to spare.)
 
Not on the Metacritic list, but definitely on mine is The A Word (MC-76, AMZ), which just completed a third season on Sundance TV.  I recently wrote about the first season here, but now that I’ve seen the third and probably final season, I want to make my praise more fulsome, because I really love this show.  Most of what I comment on here, you could easily have heard of elsewhere, but this show I bet is a find, and I want to tell you that it is well worth your time to discover it.  I won’t repeat my initial description, but get straight to the matter I left out before, the actors’ names.  First off, I have to clarify that Max Vento – the boy who plays Joe at 5, 7, and 10-years old – is not himself autistic, but definitely convinced me that he was.  Most of the cast were totally unknown to me, and probably to you unless you’re a dedicated subscriber to BritBox or AcornTV (though first two seasons of A Word are on Amazon Prime).  That contributed to the authenticity of the entire production for me, the unquestioned identity of character and performer.  The mother and father were played by Morven Christie and Lee Ingleby; I’ll probably wind up seeing them as detectives in some British mystery, but they’ll always remain Joe’s parents to me.  His grandfather was the only familiar face, Christopher Eccleston, but my main image of him was as Jude the Obscure in Michael Winterbottom’s 1996 Hardy adaptation, so this was quite a leap.  I won’t enumerate the subsidiary characters, but each is charming and/or humorous, but also authentic.  In each season, there are remarkable performances in the roles of psychologists and teachers, as well as by those who are themselves differently-abled.  The writing is sharp, funny, and true to life, and the production makes evocative use of the Lake District landscape with its Fells.  The characters are ever-changing, losing and winning our sympathy, but consistently convincing.  I’d gladly watch more, but they certainly managed a perfect series finale, if it comes to that.
 
For comparison’s sake, in the list below I include both the ranking in the aforementioned Metacritic compilation of critics best of the year lists, and also note the rating in Metacritic’s own (more reliable IMHO) ranking.  But here the best of 2020 is listed in order of the enthusiasm of my own endorsement.  And I break out documentaries into a list without reference to whether they’re considered films or tv programs.  (My reviews and links can be found by title through search box above, or by scrolling through my earlier Stevie/TV posts.)

Top Tube of 2020
 
My Ten Favorite TV Series of the Year:

Better Call Saul (#2, MC92)
The Crown (#11, MC85)
The A Word (MC85)
My Brilliant Friend (MC92)
Better Things (#15, MC90)
Pen15 (#17, MC93)
Normal People (#4, MC82)
Mrs. America (#6, MC87)
The Plot Against America (MC82)
The Queen’s Gambit (#3, MC79)
 
Five runners-up:

The Good Lord Bird (#14, MC84)
Ramy (MC83)
Unorthodox (MC85)
Sex Education (MC83)
Feel Good (MC83)
 
Some dissents, excluding genre categories in which I have no interest (e.g. sci-fi and horror):

I May Destroy You (#1, MC86) was the runaway winner in the critics’ poll, and is certainly the most “of the moment” show of the year, combining #MeToo and Black Lives Matter themes, but the show did not hit me where I live, seemed generationally remote.  (Similarly, I could not get past the second episode of I Hate Suzie (MC85) – sometimes I ask myself, “What hath Fleabag wrought?”  How many more sex- and substance- and self-abusing women in their thirties do we need to see?)
 
Bojack Horseman (#12, MC91) has gotten sterling reviews that led me to watch some episodes at random, but never compelled my attention.
 
Given its general acclaim, I tried to give Schitt’s Creek (#8, MC95) another chance, but all over again was immediately turned off by the style of acting, and could not persist to discover whatever kernel of quality others see in the series. 
 
In the interest of completeness, I watched one episode and a fraction of a second before deciding that The Great (#18, MC74) was not so great for me.  I don’t mind some contemporizing of historical pageant (such as Marie Antoinette), but this series with Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great took liberties and license too far for me to stick with it.
 
I’ll give Ted Lasso (#5, MC71) and P-Valley (#23, MC85) a chance the next time I make a trial of their respective streaming channels.
 
Documentaries
 
Three of the top four documentaries count as tv series, and City Hall at 4½ hours could easily have been a series too.  The others are feature length and the numerical ranking (*) is from Metacritic’s list of best films.  I include them as a group but find myself generally in accord with the MC rating.
 
City So Real (#24, MC93)
City Hall (#12*, MC88)
The Last Dance (#13, MC90)
How To with John Wilson (#10, MC83)
 
Time (#5*, MC91)
Dick Johnson is Dead (#11*, MC89)
Rewind (#17*, MC87)
Crip Camp (#23*, MC86)
Athlete A (#24*, MC85)
Boys State (MC84)

Totally Under Control (#56*, MC80)
The Painter and the Thief (#76*, MC79)

All In: The Fight for Democracy (MC78)

However much TV you watch, you ought to find some satisfying viewing among these offerings.
 

 

Anniversary thoughts

Having completed 16 years of writing this blog, I’ve recommitted to the vocation of film commentary in the past year, while seeing my approach come into greater relevance, with more options in the voracious-viewing, all-streaming environment. 

And I’ve developed a conversational voice that comes easily and naturally.  Just as Pauline Kael enlisted her reader in a collective “we,” I imagine the reader as a “you” who understands where I’m coming from, and is interested to know my observations on film or television.  Of my nonstop viewing, I can say what I appreciate and why, and “you” will know whether you might like it as well.

As for where I’m coming from, I offer this pledge of allegiance or statement of mission:

Cinema is my handle on the world, and “Cinema Salon” is my “handle” on the World Wide Web. 

I subscribe to Roger Ebert’s definition of cinema as a “machine for empathy.”  In retrospect, I see that as one of the reasons I became so involved with film in the first place, as an Aspy’s exercise in reading other people’s faces and emotions.

Films are my frame of reference, the lingua franca that I speak.  In conversation, I have to refrain from constantly drawing comparisons to this film or that, in response to whatever my interlocutor is saying.

Visual media are literally my window on the world.  Ideally, I am an armchair traveler to near and far, a passive participant in the press of events, a recumbent scholar of issues and emotions, an idly intrepid explorer of nature’s beauties.

So you know I’m going to continue watching cinema, and continue talking about it, for as long as I can.

[Coming soon:  an unusually timely rundown of the best television and film of 2020.]