It's nearly Oscar time, and I've finally gotten around to watching some of those "for your consideration" screeners which I am fortunate enough to receive every year. I won't go into any depth about my reactions to them; I'll just jot down a few observations:
The Shape of Water is in many ways wonderful, and in some, troubling. A great deal could be said about it, as a study in loneliness, an hommage to classic films (especially Creature from the Black Lagoon, which I remember from my childhood), a spy thriller, and an odd and touching romantic comedy. There are moments which are undeniably moving, but the script is uneven - some of it is downright amateurish - and the message is, well, strange. Ultimately, it is a film about cross-species sexuality, which, even twenty years ago would have been taboo, as well as about frustrated gay sex. Indeed, it is only when the character played by Richard Jenkins fails miserably to attract a young counter clerk (who is much younger than he and clearly out of his reach), that he agrees to help Sally Hawkins' character to rescue her swamp-creature lover.
Now, if in the fifties, when Creature from the Black Lagoon came out, someone had suggested that the young woman, instead of being reduced to helpless screeching by the thing, had actually fallen in love and had sex with it, well, I suppose the sixties era of free love would have been unnecessary. That the film is essentially about sexuality is indicated by the young monster-seductress's opening scene, in which she masturbates in the tub as part of her mute morning ritual. The idea of cross-species attraction was implicit in the film The Arrival, but in Shape of Water it is made explicit, which is, I guess, an index of how far we have come in our search for a solution to societal isolation.
But beyond that, the film takes one more step in the direction of the utter demolition of convention: The mute woman is murdered by the villain (Michael Shannon, a very good actor, who in this case does everything but twirl his mustache), but the creature pulls her into a river where, through some miraculous power it possesses, manages to resurrect her. Quite apart from the fact that, even if she could be resuscitated, she could hardly survive under water, this ascribes to the swamp thing a power formerly reserved solely to the Messiah.
Just two more notes: The sudden appearance of a thirties dance/musical number was for me the low point of the film; just silly and unnecessary. But, on the other hand, at least we now know the real cure for baldness.
Phantom Thread was another odd foray into sexual relations. I won't say much about it except to offer my opinion that Daniel Day-Lewis was not needed in this film. Any of a host of other fine British actors would have done just as well, which is saying something about the script, since Day-Lewis is, in my view, the finest film actor of our time. He wasn't given much to do, and I kept waiting for that burst of anguished rage which he does like no one since Olivier's Lear. When it finally came, it was so delayed and so punctual that it had little impact.
Again, the film ultimately (and I mean after quite a long preface) is about another bizarre sexual relationship. When we finally reach the climax, as it were, it seems that the relationship at the center of the film depends entirely upon... food poisoning. Now, this is not an evocation of the age-old theme of the love-death since nobody actually dies. But whether it is a metaphor for delayed orgasm or it is just plain weird, I really didn't care, having sat through two hours of elitist dressmaking to get to it. Talk about an anti-climax. A final note: the score, which was a mish-mash of classical music and annoying piano tinkling, was intrusive and dreadful.
About Mudbound I will say even less. It was an awful, dreary, depressing indictment of race relations in the Deep South during World War II (as if we needed another one). The script was vastly overdone, continually reaching for a profound poetry which it consistently missed by a considerable chalk. And the climactic scene, which does not bear description here, was horribly explicit, excessively violent, and completely unnecessary. For me, the question which the film raised has nothing to do with man's inhumanity to man or America's perennial race problem, so much as: Knowing what he does about the condition of black people in Mississippi, why didn't the young army veteran go somewhere else when he was demobilized? Vermont, or Massachusetts, or Canada. Anywhere where he might not be reduced to the very muteness of the star-crossed lover in Shape of Water?
Lady Bird was, I felt, an honest and convincingly-written examination of the angst of the teenage years. Well, directed and very well acted, it deserves the attention it has received. There was, however, one major loose thread in my view. After Lady Bird falls impetuously in love with her young drama club colleague and then finds him making out with another boy in the men's room, she is revolted and horribly hurt. Then, she surrenders her virginity to an uncaring lout, which proves another form of disillusionment with sex and the male. And so, when it is time for the prom, to which she has been so looking forward, she abandons her "popular" friends and goes instead with her former best girlfriend. At which point, shouldn't she be considering lesbianism? I expected her to, but nothing more was done with this. Again, a rather odd excursion into the murky swamp waters of sexuality.
For me, the weakest part of the film was the coda. By every standard of drama and audience expectation, the film ought to have ended at the airport when, freed from the awful prospect of UC Davis, young Lady Bird sets off to college in New York. Instead, her mother, who has vehemently opposed the plan, misses the opportunity to tell her goodbye. That she could have done and should have done seems a no-brainer. Instead, the film lurches into a fragmented and makeshift ex-post facto, which struck me as arbitrary, and unworthy of an otherwise endearing film.
Which brings me to Dunkirk, which I saw in the theater, twice. And I must say, much as I admired it the first time, I appreciated it even more the second. It is a brilliant piece of storytelling, which is odd since the script is rather poor, but it has been a long time since I felt that a film taught me something new about structure and interwoven story lines. Despite the rather threadbare script, which is punctuated by Kenneth Branagh gazing significantly out over the Channel and telling us, not once but twice, that he can almost see home, I found the film so compelling, so utterly riveting, that it was almost difficult to watch. It was rather like the first excruciating half-hour of Saving Private Ryan, continuing uninterrupted for two hours.
Added to the powerful impact and artistry of the film is that it is virtually silent, and has no clear main character. It is not a story of relationships so much as of events, which is very hard to pull off in a fictional narrative (even in historical fiction). And yet the events are so brilliantly orchestrated and so inherently dramatic, that one scarcely notices the lack of conventional character interplay. One further note: I am not a fan of musical scores in films; I think this is an archaic left-over from the accompaniment to silent movies. However, since Dunkirk is essentially a silent film, the score was necessary and, I thought, absolutely brilliant.
Since I am on the subject of movies, I suppose I ought to comment on the "#me-too" phenom that is sweeping Hollywood. As someone who has written a good deal about priest sexual abuse of children, I am, of course, heartily sympathetic with all those young men and women who have been exploited and assaulted in their quest for a career in films. However, I find the sudden excrescence of empathy on the part of celebrities who ought to have known better, and, I am quite sure, did know better, to be yet another iteration of Hollywood hypocrisy.
I can confidently say that everybody knew that Harvey Weinstein was a brute and a beast, and yet many of the leaders of this black-gowned, breast-beating movement worked closely with him, sometimes over periods of years, turning a blind eye to what anyone who was not blinded by ambition could see. I never worked with Weinstein himself, though I was given chances to do so, and I declined because I, like everyone else, knew his reputation for mistreating his employees. But many people, including some whom I know personally, did not scruple to work with him, hoping to feed at the trough, no matter how ugly and fetid it was.
Having said that, I should like to make a further point: Abuse, not only sexual, but moral, and psychological, is endemic to the Hollywood film business, as, indeed, it is to the Catholic Church. This, I think, will be true in any institution in which the young and hopeful are beholden to the powerful and unrestrained. And while we must take the accusers seriously and hear them out without prejudice, we must remember that our system of justice is based on the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
As we reexamine our societal attitudes toward the abuse of power in the workplace, we must keep in mind the Duke rape case and the University of Virginia scandal, in which the accusations proved to be false. Weinstein aside, you cannot accuse, try, and condemn someone in the media, ruining his or her reputation and terminating his or her career based on accusations alone. Now, in cases where multiple accusers have come forward telling essentially the same story, we are entitled to draw our own conclusions, and action must be taken to stop the abuse. But where the evidence is thinner, where there may be ulterior motives in play, we must rely on the courts to make the determination of guilt or innocence, lest we do a damning disservice to those at the center or even on the periphery of the accusations.
That this is a real danger has recently been proved by the suicide of a prominent producer whose name was indirectly linked to Weinstein, and who, apparently, was guiltless of any wrongdoing. Yet, having been dragged through the swamp, she could no longer bear the burden of shame. And that, in itself, is a terrible shame.
