THE 2015 SLIFR MOVIE TREEHOUSE #12: MEASURING THE QUALITY OF THE HIGH

See that image Dennis has on his blog-roll column to the right, the one titled "The Accidental Deletion"? That gif of the stick-man slowly bashing his hands and head to a pulp on his monitor and keyboard is an apt representation of how I feel logging on to the Internet, at the end of this week of bad pop cultural news. David Bowie is dead (and I've listened to almost nothing but his music since Monday). Alan Rickman is dead (on the same day that Hollywood--which never deigned to give Mr. Rickman even an Academy nomination for any of his work in Die Hard, Sense & Sensibility, Truly, Madly, Deeply, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Dogma or the Harry Potter films he elevated with his mordant wit and melancholy--once again decided to define "acting" as acting via more feting of Eddie Redmayne-- they should have read Marya's passionate and wonderful definition of acting in her previous post, instead). No performers of color were nominated for Oscars, the day after Elle magazine-- never a Black Lives Matter bastion, exactly-- published a piece decrying the hashtag "BlackGirlMagic" as somehow dangerous and regressive. The Revenant is showered with nominations for its inexplicable wide-angle fetish and masochism-as-performance choices, because "showing the work" is more important than the quality of that work.

What can I say? I've spent the day feeling a little blue.

On her excellent, must-read Twitter, novelist and blogger Farran Smith Nehme (aka, "The Self-Styled Siren") asked if it was just her, or were the Academy's choices getting worse each year? I think, at the very least, we can say they have been operating more and more from a crouch position in recent years-- desperate to appear cool, yet terrified of making choices (12 Years a Slave excepted) that might cause them to appear less-than-correctly in line with whatever the middlebrow tenor of the moment is. Heaven forbid Redmayne not be nominated for a part that feels less performance than press release: "Look how *brave* he is! (Don't you want to reward him? Huh? C'mon, let him have the trophy. Just let him have it.)". It's the kind of aesthetic nomination that only Parks & Recreation's Bobby Newport could love: puppy-dog begging at the service of power.

Maybe that explains why The Revenant did so well, since the film is nothing if not a bullying assault on its audience, a macho dare to dislike it and therefore be out of the loop (I know people--wrongly--talk about the Fast & Furious franchise as an exercise in dudebro-ism, but Furious 7 looks like a Lubitschian model of grace and play compared to The Revenant's grunting antics). The much-praised camerawork of the film is actually its biggest deterrent: the obsession with wide-angle framing and close-ups makes it look less like a film than a first-person shooter game, literally pushing the audience's eye out of the frame even as it longs to use cheaply moralistic violence to drag you in. The whole film operates on this single entendre reading of its cinematic legacy (it's art-house porn for people who wouldn't be caught dead at a Peckinpah or Don Siegel retrospective). 

To paraphrase Red Grant's line to James Bond in From Russia With Love: "A dolly back and symbolic linger on a crow overlooking death and destruction. That should have told me something." The excellent Tom Hardy aside (and it does say something about the range and shape of Hardy's talents that he could give interesting performances in Fury Road and The Revenant in the same year, as if wanting to corner both the good and bad ends of the movie spectrum), this is a ponderous slog of a film, perfect for people who loved the trite Native American essentialism of Dances With Wolves, but just wished it had some of the childish will-to-power of The Deer Hunter and a dash of The Piano's dreamy obtuseness. By the end, I was so battered by the movie's tumescent blend of glee and pretension at its incoherent violence that I thought they should have just called the whole thing Jeremiah’s Johnson.

But Inarritu was hardly alone in 2015 in confusing the blunt hammer of the single entendre with epic scope or depth. On the opposite end of The Revenant's Pummelvision (but very much in line with its condescending, "you don't get my dude-bro thing, man" chuckles at the expense of its audience) is something like The End of the Tour. There are many, many people on Film Twitter who found fault with the film's portrayal of David Foster Wallace (I will not name them because I suspect they don't want to be dragged back into the discussion, but I think we know who they are, and it's easy enough for curious readers to Google). I have no dog in that fight-- I've read little Wallace, never met him, and while I remember the hype around Infinite Jest, never got invested in the literary battles about it.

No, my problems with it are just as a movie: it's so hermetically sealed in its own hipster hyperbaric pod that there's no room for anyone else's sensibility. Take a Judd Apatow film, remove all of its humor and playful raunch, and I think this kind of Navel-Gazing Serious Caucasian Man movie is what you would have left: it's pseudo-intellectual posturing, Rohmer for Dummies, except it deigns to offer simplistic solutions to the philosophical questions the French master would smartly leave unanswered. I liked its feel for midwestern college towns (as the product of several of them), and I thought both Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg gave it what they could (as much as I generally cringe at his media presence, Eisenberg has a real gift for essaying passive-aggressive social cilmbers). But I wish they'd let the whole thing breathe, or even let Segel toss in some jokes-- his own screenwriting work in The Five-Year Engagement showed a far more nuanced and human take on the trade-offs of research and success. He might also have had a better idea of what to do with Mamie Gummer, whose character shows up halfway through, is on the screen for only a few minutes, but is easily the most compelling thing amidst the movie's feverish pounding away at its, um, thesis.

(A moment of praise here, too, for Gummer in general-- she was superb in Ricki and the Flash and is becoming one of those actors-- like Stanley Tucci, Parker Posey, or Patricia Clarkson--whose name makes me smile when I see it in the credits. "If nothing else," I think, "the movie has that.")

As The End of the Tour's last bit of misused R.E.M. music fades from memory (oh, how I wish!), it seems only right to turn to another disappointment, Straight Outta Compton. This one hurts, because I really wanted to like it, and there's a lot to like, from F. Gary Gray's vigorous direction to the charismatic turn by Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre (he's the one element of the movie I would have nominated). I think my problem is the opposite of that I had with The End of the Tour: here, I *did* have investments in the art and people under discussion, and all the film-making skill in the world couldn't mask the sinking feeling I had of, in the words of James Agee, "being subtly hornswoggled."

The early stuff about Dr. Dre and the formation of the group, the material with Ice Cube and his solo career, the insights into the business side of their lives-- I thought that stuff was fascinating. The recording scenes were great, and so were the recreations of live performances. But the tendency in any biopic to say "...and nothing was ever the same again," especially when it works to isolate the group as a singularity (rather than part of a broader moment of hip-hop's flourishing, increased politicization, and growing stylistic diversity) felt wrong to me. I know it's about one group, in one period (just as Love & Mercy, which has its own fraught relationship to the biopic, also is), but the larger claims it wants to make might have worked better for me if we got more acknowledgement of musical context than one scene of Ice Cube recording with the Bomb Squad.

It's actually a movie that got smaller in my imagination the more time passed, because as I turned it over in my head, I couldn't buy into the movie's paradoxical braggadocio about NWA's political stances, and its repeated insistence that "no one else is doing this" (which, having grown up with Public Enemy, the Native Tongues collective, and Boogie Down Productions, all of whom were also doing varied and genuinely radical work contemporaneous/near-contemporaneous with the 1988 Straight Outta Compton album, clearly ain't so; it works as a character aside, but the film also wants it as its motto, even placing Chuck D's famous line about rap as a black CNN in the group's collective mouth). I also wasn't sure what to do with its ambivalent take on the group's relationship to violence, which I thought it could never decide if it was celebrating or condemning (although, in fairness, The Chronic itself--which we see the genesis of in the film's second half--also wrestles with this kind of ambivalence).

In his excellent Ebert review, my fellow Treehouser Odie Henderson has some pertinent things to say about the film's politics vis-a-vis this contemporary moment, and re-reading his 4-star review tonight after an online exchange, it made me want to go back and re-watch the film with fresh eyes (although I suspect that's more a product of Odie's superb critical poetry, what he brings to and draws out the film with such careful grace, as much as the film itself). It's also possible--even probable!-- that there are a million things I'm missing, and/or struggling with in an obtuse-if-earnest way. But as a certain Chicago critic was fond of writing (quoting Robert Warshow), "A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man," and my mounting sense of despair when watching the movie was real, and similar to my response (as we think about Bowie this week) to Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine, a gorgeous, technically brilliant and often thrilling film--just as Compton is--but one whose ahistorical vision of its Bowie avatar (and by extension, Bowie himself) as some kind of sell-out to the director's adolescent dreams about what his icon should have been, is really fucking infuriating.

(Writing, re-writing, and thinking about all this for the past 90 minutes, I'm realizing that it's entirely possible I take my pop music too seriously).

Still, even if it fumbled for me, at least Compton's technical virtuosity was at the service of a set of ideas. Victoria's "I'm not giving up my shot" insistence on the single take is in the service of nothing, except a pathetically anachronistic loyalty to a sub-Tarantinoism that I thought Killing Zoe had gotten out of cinema's system. I can't say I was never interested in Victoria's formal play, especially in its first half, when there's a kind of loose, improvisational feel to the acting that makes you think the story could go anywhere. But by the time we reach the movie's bloody conclusion, I just wanted the whole thing to end.

Maybe Victoria’s director, Sebastian Schipper, should have been given the reigns on Mr. Holmes-- at least then this somnambulant take on the great detective might have had some kind of spirit. I like Ian McKellen a lot; I think Bill Condon did great work on Dreamgirls and Kinsey. I think they are not a great pairing: Gods & Monsters offered a smug moralism and a criminal take on the great George Cukor that makes it a slice of Peak ‘90s Sundance, and Mr. Holmes doesn't even have that misfire's ambitions: it sits there flat, proper, full of Laura Linney's aggrieved pantomime and a turn from McKellen whose exhaustion suggests a man waiting for his turn on Downton Abbey.

No one would accuse either Kingsman: The Secret Service or Sicario of flatness, I suspect, but it seems a shame that both drown two appealing stars-- Colin Firth and Emily Blunt, respectively--in shock-for-shock's sake effects that would be laughed at if they turned up late one night on Starz or SyFy. Blunt is transforming into one of our great action stars, and any enjoyment in Sicario comes from the pained empathy of her response to what she (and we) are seeing; Firth seems to be having a ball finding the more sadistic side of Mr. Darcy, and balancing it out with a dandy wit. But putting those talents at the service of Denis Villeneuve and Mark Millar/Matthew Vaughn is as wasteful as placing a Bose stereo in a Yugo (and a lot less comfortable a ride). I thought Vaughn's X-Men: First Class was terrific fun, but here his work is so dominated by the machinations of Millar's plot (similar in its trite heavy-handedness to his comic book work) that any joy derived from the Bond pastiche is smothered. I've managed to skip Villeneuve's other features, but Sicario really makes me worry for my beloved Amy Adams, who's shooting Story of Your Life with Villeneuve as we speak.

What's missing from all of these movies is even a spark of grace, a willingness to let the screen breathe (laugh or let up for a moment, and their respective card houses collapse). But that doesn't mean such moments were missing from the movies in 2015. In honor of that great feature Film Comment runs on "favorite movie moments", here are some of mine from the past year:

--The soccer-without-a-ball in Timbuktu;

--Nicole (the great Julianne Coté) being told that standing close to the microwave could damage her fertility, and then edging closer to it, in Tu Dors Nicole; 

--Blythe Danner on the karaoke stage in I’ll See You in My Dreams;

--The "Oh, Girl" number in Chi-raq (which might be my favorite moment in any film last year);

--John Cusack's heartbreaking admission of wanting someone to say "I love you" to, in Love & Mercy;

--Hugh Grant's meta-dismissiveness of his expository role--throwing the lines away like they were shit he was trying to politely shake off his fingers--in the helicopter in The Man from U.N.CL.E.;

--The eerie, ambiguous laughter from Elizabeth Moss that closes Queen of Earth; 

--Cate Blanchett's recounting of her stepmotherly origins in CInderella (the only version of that story to ever make sense of that character for me, and to allow her a smidgen of humanity);

--Hugh Bonneville having a face-off with the title bear, in the railway station cafe, in Paddington; 

--Harrison Ford's quietly shocked expression of revelation in The Age of Adeline; 

--And speaking of Mr. Ford: "Chewie...We're home.";

--The pain of Danny not singing his new song on stage, and how it registers on Annette Benning's face, in Danny Colllins;

--The brilliant Silver Age gee-whizness of the first 15 minutes of Tomorrowland; 

--The elevator nightmare in Horse Money; 

--The off-hand way Kristen Stewart balances a cell-phone, an in-person conversation, and a narrow train hallway, in the opening moments of Clouds of Sils Maria; 

--Tom Cruise's "What are ya gonna do?" shrug to his opponent, just before being pulled out of an aircraft transport, in the pre-credits scene of Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation; 

--The way Chris Hemsworth--half tough-guy, half movie-star--strides across the post-prison release tarmac in Blackhat, framed by Michael Mann at a low angle, with the sun beating off him like he's Sonny Crockett; 

--The slow, sad, hilarious realization that overtakes the face of Allie (Claire McNulty) when she realizes the age of her beach companions, in Fort Tilden;

--The brilliant closing credits to both Dope and Eden.

Did I have a favorite movie-going experience of 2015? Besides wondering what the chatty elderly couple behind me in The Revenant yesterday would end up thinking of its gruesomeness? (For the record, I heard many "ohhh"s and "oh myyy"s). It wasn't my favorite film of the year, but I think it was hard to top the sheer joy I felt coming out of The Force Awakens. Of course, part of it was nostalgia (the initial Lucas trilogy occupies the same place in my heart that Disney or Hammer horror films did for earlier generations, and that perhaps Harry Potter movies do for kids today). But it wasn't *just* nostalgia, but a pleasure at the movie's willingness to give pleasure, and to do it with such grace and fullness. Like it or not, there's no half-assedry on the part of J.J. Abrams and his team: they know what they are making, and they do it with blissful skill.

Bliss, mercy, grace, discovery-- when I stare at the list(s) I posted to Dennis's blog earlier this week, I realize those are keywords that stretch across everything, in varied ways, in my Top 30 (even if the films are about the loss--or the danger of losing--any of the above). And "bliss" is the defining quality of Paul Thomas Anderson's Junun, a 30-minute documentary that streamed in the fall on MUBI. Documenting the making of the Junun album in Rajasthan, India, by a collective that includes Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood (and the band's longtime producer Nigel Godrich), Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, and the Indian musical collective the Rajasthan Express, Junun is slow, hypnotic, and utterly riveting, with one foot in the messiness of the everyday details of recording, and the other in the magical chemical effects of the sounds being created. There's no narration in Junun, no introduction, and no real conclusion: it's a slice of a larger recording moment that we're given access to, and it closes with as many of its mysteries unsettled as solved. We just get the chance to peek in the room (sometimes, from a visual perspective, almost literally peek), but it's enough. It gives us everything we need, and I came out of the experience with a real high.

Is that quality of the high the secret behind Trainwreck? It was tagged as romantic comedy, and it is, but what I treasured about it was how it used the genre to actually tell a stealth tale about addiction. Had the marketing been framed differently (had it been released by the Weinsteins, or Lifetime, or A24), the movie's ties to a long tradition of such films—The Lost Weekend, Clean & Sober, and above all Days of Wine and Roses-- might have been more apparent, and it was what I kept thinking of watching the film.

Amy (Amy Schumer) is set up as a freewheeling, sexually active young woman, and it is this quality the film takes as its purported target (of both celebration and condemnation). But watch the film again, and note how often she has a drink in her hands. Note how often the recourse to a drink is her solution to anything. Notice how often that's what her arguments with her sister and her boyfriend (the invaluable and underrated Bill Hader, here building on his fine work in The Skeleton Twins) settle on. Notice how she defends her father (a surprisingly great Colin Quinn) and his own self-destructive tendencies. And then remember how many of those past addiction films mercilessly, counter-intuitively deployed the charms of actors (Ray Milland, Jack Lemmon, Michael Keaton) known for their comedic chops. I want to give Amy Schumer the 2015 award Dennis asks about, for taking her considerable wit and slapstick gifts, and using them in her screenplay to get at stuff that's not really that funny, while still making us laugh like a motherfucker.

The movie Amy may end up resolving her relationship anxieties, but the movie leaves unresolved whether or not her other, larger, more pressing problems will still be lurking somewhere in the shadows. “I hope this love montage ends like Jonestown,” our heroine narrates at one point, and the movie's fearlessness suggests that she just might, someday, still get her wish.

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Brian Doan is an Affiliate Scholar in Cinema Studies at Oberlin College, where he taught courses in film and popular culture from 2006-2011. In addition to academic research and publications on film, comics, TV and advertising, he is a contributor at RogerEbert.com and blogs at Bubblegum Aesthetics. Brian also enjoys the music of Prince and is actively annoyed by the work of Seth MacFarlane. 

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PREVIOUS TREEHOUSE ENTRIES

#1: GREETINGS FROM ON HIGH! (Dennis Cozzalio)

#2: THE STATE OF LOVING CINEMA IN OHIO (Brian Doan)

#3: THIS CRITIC’S CREED, BIG SCREEN OR SMALL (Odie Henderson)
#4: PRIVATE OBSESSIONS AND CULTISH PASSIONS (Phil Dyess-Nugent)

#5: COMING TO YOUR EMOTIONAL RESCUE (Marya Murphy)
#6: NONFICTION CONFIDENTIAL (Dennis Cozzalio)
#7: (MOTION) PICTURES, OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN! (Odie Henderson)
#8: ON CRITICAL LINEAGE AND STAYING CURRENT (Phill Dyess-Nugent)
#9: RAISING THE SPECTER OF SPECTRE (AND SHOCKING JENNIFER LAWRENCE NEWS TOO!) (Brian Doan)
#10: NOTES ON MOTHERS, FATHERS AND ACTORS (Marya Murphy)
#11: SQUAWKING OSCAR NOMINATIONS (Dennis Cozzalio)

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