Five at a Time #6: I Was In Jail With My Nephew
#26 The Killing of a Sacred Deer
There were a lot of great movies that came out in the early 2000s that were specifically deadass determined to ruin your week. It was kind of a golden age of shit that was brilliant but also physically difficult to watch — movies like Ichi the Killer, Mysterious Skin, Oldboy, Larry Clark’s nightmare rope-a-dope of Bully and Ken Park. They were extraordinary, and they were upsetting, and in many ways they were extraordinary because they were upsetting, but with some rare exceptions these kinds of movies aren’t really in vogue anymore. True, 12 Years a Slave is a transportively agonizing film and it won an Academy Award for Best Picture, which I think we’re collectively not grateful enough for. But while there have been plenty of great and intense films this decade I don’t see many that really try to put you in an armbar like the ones I mentioned above.
Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the few directors keeping this vibe going, and while Dogtooth and The Lobster were both visceral and at points borderline sadistic movies you never got the impression that they were trying to make the viewer tap out like you do from the first shot of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Lanthimos is out for blood here; if you can imagine a Greek tragedy filmed with the austerity and detached perversity of David Cronenberg’s Crash you’ll get something resembling this movie. But is the movie worth watching just by virture of being visceral and disconcerting?
Fucking of course it is. But Killing wouldn’t work half as well as it does if it didn’t pay as much attention to character detail; it’s very specific in what compromises it allows its players to make. There’s something to be said for a movie that doesn’t recognize the innocence of children or forgive any of its characters for crimes they might not even have committed. I’m almost not certain if I’d have a huge problem with Nicole Kidman being typecast in this kind of role from now on, this harrowed Stepford Wife of secret and deeply meancing intelligence, because it’s so specific and she’s so good at it. As a failed detective and accomplice to all sorts of unknown evils her character is by far the most interesting, and performed with canny awareness. Everyone’s part is, honestly, but hers strikes me as notable.
Anyway, you’re not going to get the plot out of me because the less you know going in the deeper your skin is going to get nailed into whatever is behind you when the credits start. It’s a revenge picture, one of the best. I showed my friend a song by Iannis Xenakis, a fellow Greek who also specialized in aesthetic antagonism in his time, and he described it as “sounding like what sociopaths must feel.” That’s a pretty apt description for The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a film of bludgeoning emotional intensity that may or may not have sincere origins but is all the more disconcerting and effective for it. It’s an exercise in cruelty with a luminous sheen that we don’t see much of anymore, and it will drag you up and away.
#27 Warrior
I’m gonna start using a new barometer for sadness, and it’s going to be the emotional proximity one has in relation to the scene in this movie where Tom Hardy throws a bunch of casino tokens in Nick Nolte’s face. The abashed misery and defeat Nolte conjurs in that instant without a word is supernatural, and it ties up the emotional crux of the movie — men abandoning each other, men finding reasons to abandon each other — in a beautiful and poignant performance. The collapse that follows feels almost secondary to this moment.
Warrior has a number of scenes like this, though none quite as effective as this one, and if it had entirely committed itself to this level of emotional reality throughout it would have been a truly great film and not merely a good one. But the movie takes these blustering turns into traditional ra-ra underdog theatrics that upset its otherwise grounded tone: one starts to fear partway through that the stakes will become undone by the movie’s very own premise, the spectacular reversals of fortune that are the bread and butter of the sports film, and these fears unfortunately prove to be founded. The script is hell-bent on making the brother-vs-brother matchup the emotional climax of the movie in spite of where the viewer’s attachments may actually lie, and the film does suffer for it.
But Warrior is a solid and highly enjoyable Thanksgiving kind of movie, albeit one with the squandered potential of something a bit more meaningful. I love how close the camera stays to the characters, peering over their shoulders or around their cheeks; I love the flexibility of the pallette, dismal beiges and greens giving way to neons and the bright greens of suburban lawns as the scene dictates (you’d be surprised how notable of a filmmaking trait this is, letting the scene dictate the color and not vice versa). It bespeaks a very thoughtfully made movie that could have benefited from an added level of ambition that would have better fit its craftsmanship. It’s a frustrating thing sometimes, to bear witness to a “good” movie but still have to measure one’s praise for it.
#28 Strike
Old, old movies are boring until they aren’t. Strike was created to be a propaganda film and it may have been a consistently electrifying experience in its day, but watching it now can be frustratingly tedious. It seems like there was a long period of early filmmaking where directors hadn’t figured out how to make “nothing” especially interesting to look at, maybe because naturalist dialogue hadn’t been invented per se for the screen at this point. You get these long shots of workers fretting or lazing around, the performances too mannered to contribute to a sense of atmospherics, the dialogue too pointed and expository to settle you into the moment. The best performances are when the bureaucrats are just being evil pieces of shit in their studies, throwing things just for servants to clean them up, mewling, complaining, bellowing. But while these parts are fun, they don’t have much to do with what makes the movie unique.
Where Strike articulates itself is in its moments of brutality, when it goes full Leninist in its expose of the violence inflicted upon the workers. The shot I picked above, that of a housing unit being massacred by Tsarists on horseback to quell the strike, is one of my favorite images in a movie, ever; it’s been months since I’ve seen it and actually managed to get around to writing about the movie, and I don’t think a week has passed where I haven’t thought about those silhouettes at least once. Spines crumpling under the force of a water hose, bodies burning in a riot, that’s where Eisenstein is concentrating his mojo, that’s the stuff he wants you to remember, and it works. When Eisenstein is at his peak, when he has full power over the visual and only the visual, you can feel him summoning lightning into his palms, and that stuff is worth checking the whole rest of the picture out for all by itself.
Strike is ultimately sort of an academic prospect; there is a lot of gritting of teeth to be done, a lot of forcing yourself to stay awake through some truly obsolete filmmaking in order to experience what can be at times a deeply moving display. You’ve wasted time on dumber things before, though, and however you end up seeing this it’ll probably be cheaper than a museum ticket. Sometimes learning is fun, sometimes it doesn’t have to be.
#29 Black Panther
Speaking of shit that’s significant, the changing of guards, etc., watching Black Panther made me feel how people must have felt when they saw Jaws or A New Hope back in the day: just like, oh, I guess this is how we’re doing things from now on. Neat.
What left is there to say about this film? It’s exquisite, as good as everyone says it is, maybe even better. It’s a perfect adventure movie. It has Vince Staples on the soundtrack and the best fight in a superhero movie since The Dark Knight Rises. The costume design is Felliniesque, the sets like something out of a Final Fantasy game come to life. It’s genuinely funny, genuinely thrilling. Its very existence is shocking in the best kind of way.
#30 Young Adult
Young Adult is a softer, American take on a style of familial black comedy that the Dutch seemed to have had a monopoly on for the longest time (for whatever reason). It’s pretty good! Charlize Theron plays sort of a well-to-do female version of Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force in this movie, which is not really what I was expecting. She is a brilliant character on her own terms, a genuinely loathsome specimen, but the film can’t really decide if she’s learned a lesson by the end of it all or not. When Babbitt first came out Sinclair Lewis had been accused of being too close to the character to really dig in and write as mean of a satire as he could or should have, and I have my suspicions that Diablo Cody is in no sense dissimilar to protagonist Mavis Gary, leading to a similar problem. She certainly takes the rug out from under Mavis’ feet in brutal fashion, but can’t bear to leave her lying on the ground even though that’s likely where she deserves to stay. As such, the movie can’t help but feel muddled by the end: Young Adult ends up being weirdly sheepish, not condoning the character’s behavior but also seemingly unable to bring itself to condemn her, despite how openly hateful and vacuous she is.
This could have ended up being a much bigger problem, but the movie is compact and engaging; it has the density of a good short story, doing in 90 minutes what many dramedies struggle to get across in two and a half hours. Patton Oswalt has an interesting role as a kind of a parallel universe version of himself if he’d never made it out of his parents’ house, and he has very charming chemistry with Theron even if their relationship matures in a somewhat predictable direction. It’s cold, also: the first five minutes are almost silent, a depiction of a dismal daily routine overlaid with grim Minnesotan hues. It’s an artuflly made yet narratively precise sequence, and if the rest of the film had maintained the intro’s level of focus it could have been one of the most poignant comedies to come out in years.
As it stands, Young Adult is a bit too clever for its own good, and perhaps, as dark as it gets, it should have committed to a more conclusively bleak vision. I feel similarly about this as I did The Fighter: there’s no good reason in the world to suggest you don’t watch it, because it’s worth your time. But knowing the depth it could have shown with a bit more self-awareness can’t help but haunt the final product.
