On with the show

In this post, I will accumulate comments on films of 2020, or even earlier, that I have finally tracked down on streaming.  First off is the latest from one of my very favorite filmmakers, which I’ve been awaiting since its film festival premiere in 2019, though technically it remains eligible for my best of 2020 list.
 
After winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda took the opportunity to make his first film outside Japan – The Truth (MC-75, SHOW) – and went total fan-boy, enlisting Catherine Deneuve and Juliet Binoche into a cinematic love letter that plays like a mash-up of Autumn Sonata and Call My Agent!  Kore-eda has a much gentler soul than Ingmar Bergman, and his portrait of the troubled relationship between a performing mother and her scarred adult daughter is less ravaging to the spirit than it was for Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann.  Deneuve and Binoche are caustic, yet with a twinkle that kept me quite amused throughout.  Deneuve plays an acting diva much like herself (the character has her real middle name), who’s just published an autobiography called The Truth, which the book is definitely not.  Binoche is a screenwriter in the States, married to tv actor Ethan Hawke, who returns to Paris for the book’s publication, and is roped into a role as on-set assistant to her mother.  She’s in a silly sci-fi film, as the elderly daughter of a space-traveling mother who has never aged, which continuously resonates with her own difficult mother-daughter relationship.  She took the role because her young co-star seemed an avatar of her long-deceased best friend (shades of Deneuve and her sister, Françoise Dorleac).  Deneuve is a sly monster of self-regard, and Binoche does her best to look plain as well as pained; Hawke is goofy and endearing, and as their daughter Clementine Grenier contributes another excellent child performance for Kore-Eda.  This may not have the overall impact of his other great films, but is full of small delights for the dedicated cinéaste.
 
To see that film, I took a free trial of Showtime, so I looked around that channel for anything else to watch, and came up with a sleeper, Driveways (MC-83, SHOW).  Films about the relationship of an old man and a young boy have a history of pleasing crowds, and this is no exception, but rather than treacly, Andrew Ahn’s direction is modest and subtle.  It stars Brian Dennehy in one of his last roles, and has a touch of elegy about it.  Lucas Jaye debuts delightfully as the 9-year-old Asian-American boy who moves in next door to the isolated widower.  His mother has come to clear out the house of her estranged and deceased older sister, who turns out to have been a hoarder (filmed in Poughkeepsie NY, I found out later).  These marginalized people gradually form a bond, in a way that warms the heart, without being “heartwarming.”  Brief and understated, with no twists in the tale, this film is mild but lingers in the mind as a paean to companionship, wherever it is found.
 
Digging deeper into Showtime’s offerings, I came up with Dark Waters (MC-73, SHOW).  Directed by Todd Haynes, though you’d never know to look at it, this is really Mark Ruffalo’s show (even more so than I Know This Much Is True).  Out of their shared environmental concerns, exec producer Ruffalo plays a corporate defense lawyer in Cincinnati, who changes sides when a farmer friend of his grandmother back in West Virginia comes to him with evidence of his herd being killed by toxic water run-off from a DuPont facility.   The film follows the tangled proceedings of the actual case over two decades, emphasizing the drudgery and dogged commitment of lawyer Rob Bilott, in a stand-out performance from Ruffalo.  Though the genre formula for such investigations into corporate malfeasance is pretty well set, Haynes keeps the complications and ramifications of the case clear and involving, without his usual stylistic flourishes.  Bill Camp and Tim Robbins stand out in the solid supporting cast.  When we’re told that corporations are people too, my friend, this film reminds us that if so, then those people should be considered sociopathic and committed to an institution.
 
I recently commented on “Aggressive silliness,” and have just come across another palatable example.  Extra Ordinary (MC-72, SHOW), plays like Ghostbusters in an Irish village.  Enda Loughman and Mike Ahern are the writer-directors of this supernatural rom-com starring Maeve Higgins, as the dumpy but endearing woman who renounced her ghost-detecting talents after a bad experience, and now makes a living as a driving instructor.  Her services are still in demand, but she only takes on another exorcism when appealed to by a widower played by Barry Ward, to whom she takes a nervous fancy.  Meanwhile Will Forte is a one-hit wonder who has retreated to an Irish castle, and is literally making a deal with the devil to revive his musical career.  It all moves along in fast and funny fashion, in the manner of Simon Pegg’s genre parodies, and does not overstay its welcome.   
 
This post has turned into an encore to “Show-me-time,” to which you can refer for other recommendations should you take advantage of a month’s free trial of Showtime.  After the Academy Award nominations come out, I will follow up with a post on “Catching up with Oscar.”