Of Paramount importance

Taking a two-month special offer for Paramount+ (i.e. Showtime) in particular to see the new Kelly Reichardt film Showing Up (MC-85), which was rather disappointing but I did catch some other worthwhile viewing on the channel.  Despite a friend’s recommendation, the Metacritic rating, my admiration for Michelle Williams, and for some of Reichardt’s earlier films (most notably First Cow), I could find no point of connection with this one.  If this story of self-involved artists in Portland OR is supposed to be comical, it was lost on me.  If it was supposed to be serious, I didn’t get the point.  Was it deadpan satire, or homegrown low-key drama?  Beats me.  I was relieved when it ended, though none the wiser.  [Streaming pro tip: many of these Showtime movies turned up later on the free library service Kanopy.]
 
Nicole Holofcener started in the film business working on Woody Allen films, her stepfather being his producer.  And after six features of her own and uncountable television episodes, she remains a sort of female Woody Allen, without the personal baggage.  I’ve liked all her films, but You Hurt My Feelings (MC-80) particularly drives home the comparison, dissecting the anxieties and impostures of well-off Manhattan intellectuals, or wannabes.  An author and writing instructor (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her psychotherapist husband (Tobias Menzies) disparaging the manuscript of her second book, which he has praised to her face.  He has his own professional woes, as his patients complain that he does nothing to help them.  Her sister and brother-in-law have comparable midlife questions about the worth of their work.  For each, self-esteem is extreme but fragile.  For us, their troubles are amusingly slight, but familiar, authentic, and understandable.
 
Three recent independents caught my eye while on the channel, all well worth viewing. For Montana Story (MC-73), Haley Lu Richardson was the draw for me, but Owen Teague matched her nicely, playing siblings who were once exceptionally close, as they would have to be growing up on such a remote ranch.  But they’ve had no contact for seven years, until their bullying father has a stroke, and each returns for differing reasons to the magnificent landscape they’ve left behind.  The writer-director pair Scott McGehee and David Siegel deliver an intimate family drama under the Big Sky, well worth seeing.
 
Eliza Scanlen is excellent as The Starling Girl (MC-78), a devout but deviating 17-year-old in a fundamentalist community in Kentucky.  She falls for a charismatic young pastor (Lewis Pullman, from Lessons in Chemistry), with predictable but still wrenching results.  I caught a whiff of The Scarlet Letter in writer-director Laurel Parmet’s tale, and with the film’s tremendous specificity and immediacy, I was thoroughly won over by her debut feature.
 
Savannah Leaf goes from volleyball Olympian in 2012 to writer-director with Earth Mama (MC-84), an Olympian sort of debut itself.  This is an empathic, up-close-and-personal portrait of a young Black woman, very pregnant and with two children in foster care, while she is in recovery and going through the hoops necessary to recover them.  There’s no father around, nor parents, but there is a sisterhood, with cautionary and redemptive influences.  As the central character, Tia Nomore is absolutely riveting, and the film does its best to see the world through her eyes and walk in her shoes, to question her choices but to wonder what any other person might do in her place.  Intensely immersive, this is a film that represents the unrepresented.  Born in Britain but growing up in the Bay Area, where the film in set, Leaf cites Ken Loach as an influence, and that shows to good effect.
 
Having just reread the book with great delight, I was glad for another chance to see Mansfield Park (1999, MC-71).  I had very fond memories of Frances O’Connor in the lead, but this time around I was struck by her difference from the Fanny Price of the book, much more like Jane Austen herself than her meek, pious heroine.  The insertion of anachronistic sex and politics did not bother me as much as the transformation of Fanny into a lively character in the vein of Austen’s Emma or Elizabeth.  Embeth Davidtz and the rest of the cast were closer to the characters in the book.  Patricia Rozema’s adaptation and direction made for an interesting study in transformation, if not in fidelity to the text.
 
If you liked Catastrophe or Fleabag – and really, how could you not? – then I’d advise you to check out Colin from Accounts (MC-83), an 8-episode half-hour series from real-life Aussie couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer.  Their evident chemistry powers the show, as he plays a forty-something owner of a brew pub, and she’s a just-turning-thirty medical intern.  “Colin” is their name for the dog that occasions their odd-couple meet-cute.  There’s a lively assortment of coworkers and exes who surround and comment on their developing relationship.  The out-there comedy deepens not just into romance but drama as well.
 
Back in the day, I enjoyed several Thomas Mallon books and have since read his essays when I come across them.  I hadn’t read his novel Fellow Travelers (MC-76), but the association (and a favorable review or two) led me to sample an episode.  The decades-spanning political backdrop and the chemistry of the two male lovers, in the performances of Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, led me to watch all eight episodes of Ron Nyswaner’s well-made show, which plays as a companion piece to “Angels in America.”  Apart from the occasional graphic sex sequences (a Showtime staple), the series provides a telling look at the persecuted gay subculture of DC (and later SF) from the days of McCarthy and Cohn to the Reagan years, the historical record woven through a long, fraught relationship between a married diplomat and a spiritually-tormented activist.  I wasn’t entirely sold on the time-hopping approach of the series (not sure whether it follows or departs from the original novel), but as a whole the show hangs together and sustains interest in an impressive manner (unlike most Showtime series).
 
The Curse (MC-76) has been getting a lot of attention, but I wrote it off halfway through the first episode as just too dragged out to sit through, then went back to give it another chance.  Still no go for me, and the end of my interest in Paramount+ for now, but if you should sample the channel sometime, do not miss Couples Therapy, in my view the best Showtime series ever.