The last of last year

It’s always deep into the next year before I catch up with all the worthy films of the previous year, so this is my final mopping up of the films of 2020.

 
Clearly, a lot of people really liked Minari (MC-89, dvd), but I did not share the enthusiasm.  There were certainly some attractive aspects to writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s autobiographical film, about his Korean family’s move to a remote Arkansas farm in the 1980s, but the characters didn’t make sense to me and the story seemed constructed more than observed and recollected.  You know – cute kid, crochety grandmother, fighting parents, trial by water and fire, the immigrant’s take on the American Dream.  I won’t warn you away from this film, but I wonder whether you will find more in it than I did.
 
Same deal with Soul (MC-83, dvd).  There must be those who believe Pixar can do no wrong, but I definitely would have voted for Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers as the year’s best animated feature.  This was not Inside Out, with its canny simplification of personal psychology, but an unintelligible mishmash about souls (ghostlike blobs reminiscent of Casper) in transit to and from the earth.  It would have been so much better if the movie had stuck to the sense of soul music or soul brothers and sisters.  Perhaps Disney needed to save money, since the scenes in heaven were so much simpler in design than the dense and amazing depictions of NYC street life.  If only this film had stuck to terra firma.
 
Though technically a 2021 release, The Father (MC-88, AMZ) was among last year’s Best Picture nominees, and deservedly so.  And having seen Anthony Hopkins’ title performance, I’m less inclined to argue that Chadwick Boseman was robbed in the Best Actor category.  Though Florian Zeller is a first-time director of his own stage play, he makes it highly cinematic in depicting dementia from the inside, with a subjective view of the old person’s surroundings and acquaintances, the viewer experiencing a cognate dislocation and befuddlement.  Hopkins is spectacularly good at inhabiting the confused mind, and Olivia Colman is also good as his caring but pained daughter, with the bonus of Olivia Williams as her alter ego in the father’s eyes.  Imogene Poots makes an impression in a small role as the old man’s latest carer.  Really a masterful production all round, though not everybody’s idea of entertainment.  What a dementia film series you could have with this film, Amour, Away from Her, Still Alice, and even Elizabeth is Missing!
 
And I wouldn’t quibble about Vanessa Kirby’s Best Actress nomination for Pieces of a Woman (MC-66, NFX), belatedly watched after I was taken with her performance in The World to Come (both roles quite different from her younger Princess Margaret in The Crown).  Descriptions of the harrowing home birth that opens the film had kept me away.  The scene is indeed visceral and eviscerating, but doesn’t turn into a horror movie.  Seemingly shot in one long, long take with a gliding, probing camera, it has immediacy and presence, but doesn’t rub your face in it.  The couple who made the film, director Kornel Mundruczo and writer Kata Weber, seem to have an intimate acquaintance with the subject.  The rest of the film follows the aftermath month by month, as the couple (Shia LeBeouf is the husband) struggles to build a bridge from an aching past to a hopeful future, their life complicated by Kirby’s mother, played by Ellen Burstyn.  The film goes off on tangents with some other characters, and relies heavily on some metaphorical objects to tie its disparate pieces together, but Vanessa Kirby offers a memorable portrait of excruciating anguish and muted grief.  The familiar feel of the Boston settings is a plus, but not quite enough to earn my outright recommendation.
 
There are films that I resent because they’re just good enough to keep me watching in the hopes that the whole will take shape and come together, but then the end arrives, and I have to say, “Is that all you’ve got?  You drag me along this far, and give me nothing in the end.  Why were you wasting my time?”  Case in point:  The Nest (MC-79, Show).  In my view, this is the second time that writer-director Sean Durkin has buffaloed a lot of critics.  Jude Law and Carrie Coon are enough to draw one in, as he uproots the mixed family (with two nondescript kids) from America to London, in pursuit of a big 1980s financial score.  They wind up in an ancient mansion in the Sussex countryside, which seems sure to be haunted.  As the deal-making bro’s plans and boasts prove hollow, the marriage frays and the kids act out.  I won’t say where the story goes, not because that would be a spoiler, but because it doesn’t go anywhere at all.
 
Misbehaviour (MC-62, Starz) is no great shakes as a film, but the presence of Lesley Manville, Jesse Buckley, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw was enough to draw me in (I find Keira Knightley generally less enticing), and I didn’t regret sitting through this fact-based film about feminists disrupting the 1970 Miss World pageant in London, but it certainly pales next to Mrs. America.
 
I don’t know what to say about The Disciple (MC-83, NFX), except that it takes one into a very unfamiliar world of Indian classical music, and shows the travail of a musician who can’t quite measure up to the stringent discipline of the form.  It’s definitely a serious piece of work, but I didn’t really get a lot of it, either the film or the music itself, though I persisted throughout its enigmatic length.

One last lukewarm response to report, since I finally got to see News of the World (MC-73, dvd).  Directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks, this film had plenty to recommend itself, but not enough for me to do so in turn.  It seemed like an utterly conventional Western, revisiting familiar scenes but not making anything new out of them.  In 1870s Texas, Hanks is a Confederate veteran who pieces out a living as an itinerant reader of news, storytelling out of the papers and passing the hat in remote outposts.  In his travels, he comes across a doubly-orphaned girl (Helena Zengel), stolen from her German immigrant parents in a massacre by Kiowa, who were later massacred by soldiers.  They journey together through the desolate West, every scene reminiscent of earlier Westerns, to the utterly predictable conclusion.  It’s all quite well done, but why?  We see myth and counter-myth, with a reverse echo from present politics, but we get little sense of actual history.

 
That about wraps up 2020 films for me.  Going down the Metacritic Top 100, I don’t see any more that I am dying to see, but I do notice one that I want to add to my best of the year lists (this one or that one) – the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, now available on the Criterion Channel as well as Kanopy.