This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel return to the world of cinema with Fritz Lang‘s classic police procedural (and a prototype of the genre), M (1931), a film from Weimar Germany which hits a bit differently today, but no less powerfully. And then we venture into Brady Corbet‘s towering and inventive immigrant story (featuring an Oscar-winning performance from Adrian Brody, The Brutalist (1:07:37).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating (M): 10 out of 10 FilmWonk rating (The Brutalist): 8.5 out of 10
Show notes:
[01:50] Review: M
[27:07] Review: The Brutalist
[46:20] Spoilers: The Brutalist
Listen above, or download: M, The Brutalist (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)
This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel check out two very different takes on thirtysomething nostalgia for your teenage years, first with My Old Ass, starring Aubrey Plaza and feature newcomer Maisy Stella as the older and younger versions of the same person, meeting through the magic of psylocibin. And then we catch up with Luca Guadagnino‘s fraught and sexy tennis triad, Challengers (1:01:26).
This review originally appeared as a guest post on 10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective, a film site in which editor Marcus Gorman and various contributors revisit a movie on the week of its tenth anniversary. This retro review will be a bit more free-form, recappy, and profanity-laden than usual.
“If I drop this phone a thousand times, a million times…and one time, it doesn’t fall. Just once…it hovers in the air. That is an error that’s worth looking at.” -“You’re so fucking stubborn.”
I’ll be honest; I’m not sure my eye has evolved enough in ten years to give me anything new to see in I Origins. You can consult my 2014 review or our spoiler-filled podcast discussion, as I did after rewatching the film this weekend, found that my opinion about the film itself has not substantially changed.
“I worry that some people will come away from I Origins believing that it has abandoned its post in the apocalyptic battle between science and religion – that after spending easily half the film with atheistic scientist Dr. Ian Gray (Michael Pitt) fastidiously attempting to model each of the evolutionary steps in the development of the human eye, the film veers off into more conventional territory. That by delving into the supernatural, the film strips away its ambitions and becomes yet another Hollywood-kumbaya tale of how we should probably all just get along and believe what we want. But based on the evidence presented in the film, this couldn’t be further from the truth.”
By and large, I still felt this way when the film was over. The battle rages on, but this film takes a nuanced position on it. The first act of I Origins is a whirlwind romance between Ian and Sofi (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), a vaguely defined spiritualist and model, which begins with an impromptu and nearly silent party hookup, continues with an oddly mystical Cinderella search in which Ian follows a string of coincidences and numbers (and eventually Sofi’s eyes on a billboard makeup ad) to the woman herself. Their relationship remains firmly in the honeymoon phase, presented in montage form, before reaching an abrupt end as Sofi gets suddenly and brutally bisected in an accident involving a malfunctioning metal box in her apartment building. This follows a fight in which the pair seems on the verge of breaking up, and Ian doesn’t come off particularly likable, and in a way, that’s what made the scene so effective? Freak accidents aren’t tidy or narratively satisfying – a terrible thing happens so fast you barely realize it, and then you realize it, and then you scream. Despite a heartfelt performance from Bergès-Frisbey and impressive, if perfunctory, chemistry with Pitt as her ontologically mismatched boyfriend, Sofi fits a dismissive mold that I still use all the time: “more concept than character”. I was critical of Sofi’s short shrift and fridging when I saw the film originally, but as Cahill’s next film Bliss would illustrate 7 years later, this is a filmmaker whose slightly muddy sci-fi ideas often land better with me than his storytelling and characterization.
In I Origins, these ideas are initially voiced by smug atheist Ian, who literally pauses his search for Sofi to read Richard Dawkins at a bar (as if trying to give her a head start on not fucking him again). In his molecular biology lab, Ian seeks to understand the evolution of the human eye in order to provide a scientific rebuttal to the creationist notion of irreducible complexity, which posits that certain biological systems (like the eye) are so complicated that they simply couldn’t have evolved on their own without the guiding hand of God to make them do so. “Why are you working so hard to disprove God?” asks Sofi, and Ian clarifies that he has no interest in God – he’s just trying to fill in a gap in human understanding. Like every component of “intelligent design”, irreducible complexity is unpersuasive pseudoscience whose sole purpose is to give young-Earth creationist dogma a patina of intellectual rigor in order to be able to argue falsely in acquiescent Republican-stacked federal courtrooms that it is not a violation of the separation of church and state to force every teacher to tell every child that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But more on that in a moment.
First, my priors. I was raised Christian. I spent many years in the church, and even went on missions to persuade others to forge a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The beginning of the end of my religious years was like something out of a Pureflix script, as poorly explained by Kevin Sorbo: I went to college and attended a meeting of Campus Crusade, and I chatted with the other Christian boys about the origins of *gestures around* all of this. I asked how they squared the evidence for evolution and the age of the Earth with the existence of the God we both believe in, and I meant every word of it. I was trying to keep my religion, not continue losing it. We treated each other well. The conversation was kind, cheerful, and civil. We met each other as we were – ignorant young adults – and I heard arguments presented with love and sincerity ranging from “God made the universe and can use whatever tools He wants to make it run” to “yes, the Bible says it all happened in seven days, but who knows how long a day is in Heaven, God exists outside of time”, etc. This was a nice moment in my life in which imperfect humans came together with good intentions to explore ideas together. And I found the Christians’ answers so unsatisfying that it was the beginning of the end of my belief in God – or at least, my belief in any specific deity as a necessary or productive component for humanity’s ability to know and describe the Universe. I read books on biology and anthropology and geology and cosmology and astronomy and became an atheist so gradually that I hardly even realized I’d lost touch with the man upstairs. Fundamentally, I still believe in humanity’s capacity to be persuaded to change its ideas, because it happened to me and I’ve seen it happen to others. I know that one of my faults entering middle age has been the temptation to view myself in a static sort of way – I bask in a cozy feeling that because I’m comfortable in my own skin now, I always have been. I’m an imperfect rationalist! I look for the truth even if it’s difficult or complicated. I have my biases, and I can absolutely be wrong. And it’s been a hard ten years watching the world go insane.
After watching the unchecked march of the religious right in my country (including their baffling choice of Messiah, Donald Trump – who worships no god but himself) – I come back to I Origins and think to myself, “Alright, solidifying the evolution of the eye is an interesting argument. But who is it for?” Christian supremacists have shown that they have little use for evidence or ideological coherence as they consolidate their power. Dobbs, Burwell, and other court decisions have made it clear the degree to which the federal judiciary has become a Calvinball venue for rubber-stamping right-wing policy that they can’t achieve via other means, culminating in Trump v. United States, an ably named case in which the Supreme Court unconditionally surrendered on behalf of the country. To borrow a phrase from the angel Loki (Matt Damon) in Dogma, Christian fascists only need one argument: “Do it or I’ll fuckin’ spank you.” This loud and deplorable faction’s assault on institutions of knowledge and science has culminated in a know-nothing certainty that the loudest, richest assholes in the room know what’s really going on, blaming those people you already hate for every problem, including many that don’t exist, and eliding past the ones caused and exacerbated as a matter of policy by their own elected selves. And it has gotten worse. The GOP was smugly denying climate change for decades before they gained the power to literally make it illegal to mention climate change in Florida law and policy. They were trying to foist religion back into schools for decades before Louisiana passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every classroom. And from coast to coast in this country, right-wing politicians spent the duration of a deadly viral pandemic watching millions of Americans die as they formed a deliberate, strategic alliance with the virus itself, and while some of them were punished for it electorally, it seems to have collectively exited the American psyche as we barrel toward reelecting the man who offered to cure what ailed us with bleach and sunshine up our collective asses. The storm rages on, and King Donald scribbles it away with a Sharpie. I’ve run afield of the film a bit, but I guess I’m just tired. In 2014, I regarded I Origins as Cahill’s full-throated allegorical endorsement of the scientific method as well as humanity’s capacity for reasoned discourse, and I loved the film for that. But that faith has become harder to maintain in the face of evidence that knowledge doesn’t matter nearly as much as power.
After a seven-year time jump, Ian goes on a book tour chronicling his successful work replicating the evolution of the human eye in a lab using genetically engineered worms, and when I first saw the film, I was fresh off watching all 3 hours of the debate between creationist Ken Ham and science communicator Bill Nye. There’s a moment near the end of this debate in which the men are asked what it would take to change their minds, and while the Ken Hams of the world are happy to tell you that they need no facts whatsoever to believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago by Almighty God, the Bill Nyes will still volunteer that all it would take to change their beliefs is one single piece of evidence. This same sentiment appears in the text of this film, placed in the mouth of both Ian and the Dalai Lama, and then it goes a step further: It presents Ian with evidence for persistence of memory and reincarnation after death – evidence he could simply choose to ignore, because the idea of his dead girlfriend’s soul finding a new corporeal home is preposterous, disturbing, and sad to him. But instead, he does the right thing: He pursues the truth even if it doesn’t agree with his prior assumptions. In a parable featuring a single fact which upends Ian’s understanding of science, he and his team choose to react in an admirable way: Let’s do more science! I maintained this rosy view of the film’s third act even as the science turned out to be poorly designed and yielded mixed results. Pro tip for anyone testing paranormal activity: keep your methods consistent and don’t call out “correct/incorrect” unless you wish to be branded a poor scientist. But at least they tried! And in performing their messy and imperfect science, they not only made the ending feel grounded in reality, but they unlocked a whole new branch of research which a mid-credits scene all but confirms reflects reality in the film’s world.
Conversely, it’s fair to say that reality in our world has soured I Origins for me a bit. The film’s world can remain rosy because it doesn’t need to persuade me of what might change as a result of this discovery – it merely needs to maintain internal consistency. Ian’s proof (or rather, well-designed experimental model) of the evolution of the human eye would probably attract little notice in real life. And in the event it were noticed and perceived as a threat, I know there is an entire propaganda ecosystem which could be deployed to pillory, dox, threaten, and swat this man until he stops talking about it, just as it has been used against every other enemy of the religious right, from pediatricians to beer spokesmodels to climate scientists to IRS agents. I’m even further removed from the church that raised me than I was in 2014, but I still remember what I saw there: A few weirdos, a few kooks, a few fanatics… but mostly just…people. Ordinary people forming community with their neighbors, living their lives, and doing their best with what they had. I don’t really think all or even most religious people are fascists, dogmatic, or unreasonable – and I would regard it as a personal failure if I ever came to believe this, even as our government continues to operate lopsidedly in favor of that fringe minority, and a reliable percentage of Christians turn out to vote Republican no matter how violent or depraved the resulting governance turns out to be. I really hope I’m right to maintain my faith in people. I hope the ones who love the Lord Their God with all their hearts, souls, and minds will try to remember to engage those faculties – as should the rest of us, for whatever value they hold as metaphors for what makes us human. I hope history will swing back in a direction where facts and science matter more than holding up a Bible you haven’t read and cutting rich people’s taxes. Perhaps when that happens, I can have fun with a rip-roarin’ science vs. religion debate again.
This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel check in on the latest from director Yorgos Lanthimos and his Poor Things collaborators Emma Stone and co-screenwriter Efthimis Filippou (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster, Dogtooth), whose presence announces in advance that this is gonna be one of the weird ones. Additional weird ones include Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe, and everyone who ventures out to catch this one in theaters (36:34).
May contain NSFW language. [CW: Self-harm, pregnancy loss]
FilmWonk rating: 8 out of 10
Show notes:
[01:44] Review: Kinds of Kindness
[23:07] Spoilers: Kinds of Kindness
We slightly misstated Stone’s awards history, which includes Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress in Birdman and The Favourite (both eventual #1 Glennies selections), and wins for Best Actress for Poor Things and La La Land.
Yorgos Stefanakos, who appears in the film as R.M.F., did not appear in Dogtooth, but did appear in Poor Things, and is in fact a notary public and an old friend of the screenwriters of this film.
Listen above, or download: Kinds of Kindness (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)
This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel reunite with long-time friend of the pod Erika to review Furiosa, a return to the Mad Max saga which absolutely refused to rest on its laurels conceptually or thematically. Then, at Daniel’s behest, we “see what Jerry Seinfeld is up to” with Unfrosted, new on Netflix. And then we venture back to a gem of a crime dramedy from 2019, Lorene Scafaria‘s Hustlers(1:17:55).
This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel check out Doug Liman‘s faithful and surprisingly enjoyable Road House remake, a film which somehow finds its feet with a western premise that was dated in the 80s, transplanted here into the Florida Keys, where that decade never ended. And then we reach back into 2023 for an epic of Biblical apocrypha by The Harder They Fall director Jeymes Samuel, The Book of Clarence, a mixed bag of religious satire which somehow manages to give The Life of Brian a run for its money. Exvangelicals should not miss this one (1:05:48).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating (Road House): 7/10 (Glenn), 7.5/10 (Daniel) FilmWonk rating (The Book of Clarence): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 6.5/10 (Daniel)
This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel check out The Beekeeper, an enjoyably uncomplicated John Wick retread which is heavy on bee metaphor and light on everything else. And then they check out The Kitchen, the near-future dystopian sci-fi film on Netflix, set in London’s last remaining social housing unit, and featuring the feature debut of actor Daniel Kaluuya as co-writer/co-director (53:59).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating (The Beekeeper): 6/10 (Glenn), 5/10 (Daniel) FilmWonk rating (The Kitchen): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 6.5/10 (Daniel)
Show notes:
[02:26] Review: The Beekeeper
[21:04] Review: The Kitchen
[45:11] Spoilers: The Kitchen
The audiobook production of Vladimir Nabokov‘s Lolita that Daniel referred to was indeed narrated by actor Jeremy Irons, and is available on all audiobook platforms.
Directed by Larry Charles, screenplay by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp.
Dicks: The Musical is available as a paid rental, and will be available to stream on Max.
Wonka, a film I broadly enjoyed, was middling and forgettable as a musical, and its terminal rehash of “Pure Imagination” was nothing less than a confession that the filmmakers were quite aware of that. Not so with Dicks: The Musical, which is one of the most memorable and horrifying musicals I’ve ever seen. This has to be why the film’s outstanding red-band trailer led with song – it knew it had a book of certified bangers on its hands. The film began as a two-man show off Broadway (called “Fucking Identical Twins”), and was expanded with new songs in its film adaptation featuring the talents of Megan Thee Stallion, Nathan Lane, and Megan Mullaly. The show’s original writer-performers (Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson) reprise their roles as the [extremely obviously gay] alpha-hetero salesmen Craig and Trevor, who amp up the misogyny and horniness to a farcical pitch before turning to their main objective: discovering that they are long-lost brothers, and getting their parents (Lane and Mullaly) back together, despite everyone involved being an adult with a job and a place of their own, and despite Lane playing the only out gay man in the entire story – unless you count Bowen Yang as God. The production design from veteran art director Steven Wolff (an assortment of TV projects, plus Starship Troopers and Steel Magnolias?) is magnificent, with the film never missing an opportunity to turn a background poster into a horny joke. And that’s before you even get to the Sewer Boys, which – despite Trevor’s plea that his father explain them immediately – defy explanation both internally and upon review. They are, however, disgusting, hilarious, and a significant driving force behind the third act – and almost solely responsible for landing this film in the problematic 11th slot. Because Dicks is destined to become a cult classic, or so the Sewer Boys keep whispering inside my mind.
#10: Barbie
Directed by Greta Gerwig, written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
Mattel, a toy company, isn’t going to shock me with its desire to sell more toys, any more than Nintendo trying to sell more games, or Hasbro smashing toy robots together. But movies are still a medium of stories and characters who will, at some point, have to explain to me why I should bother watching what amounts to a two-hour toy commercial, and the Barbie doll’s position as an iconic but dated piece of Americana doesn’t obviate that requirement. So you can imagine my delight when director Greta Gerwig (with a script co-written with frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach) decided to play with a broad and inclusive set of dolls, all singing and dancing a medley of existential dread on the border between Barbieland – a plastic, pastel fever dream (beautifully realized by veteran production designer Sarah Greenwood) where Barbie’s in charge and Ken is surplus to requirements – and the real world, where the Patriarchy is alive and well; we just hide it a bit better than we used to. It’s not much of a boast to say I’m less of a fragile little bran muffin than Ben Shapiro, whose vague fleshy blob turned instantly to windblown ash the moment the P-word was uttered in dialogue not once, but a baker’s dozen times. But if you’ll indulge me a problematic compliment, I was genuinely delighted to see that this toy commercial had some fucking balls. Because while my cynical side will assume that Mattel approved every image and sound that appears on this screen, and corporate feminism always exists with a degree of self-aware marketability, it’s hard for me to imagine that having a modern child (Ariana Greenblatt) tell Barbie to her crying face that she’s the dumb, fascist scion of a vapid and environmentally destructive consumer culture was their first advertising choice.
Directed by Kitty Green, screenplay by Green and Oscar Redding.
The Royal Hotel is available for paid rental on all VOD platforms, and will likely be streaming on Hulu later this year.
There’s nothing fun or glamorous about the latest subtle and brutal work of psychological terror and feminism from writer-director Kitty Green (The Assistant). This is not the only film on this list that engages in a credible way with the patriarchy, but it is the one that manages to do so without ever mentioning it in its script, instead presenting the reality of a pair of American expats (Julie Garner and Jessica Henwick). The pair navigates their way from partying in Sydney to running out of money and going to work as bartenders in a far-flung mining town in the Outback, where the misogyny, dick jokes, and possessiveness by the men who live and work there becomes the smothering ambiance of their daily lives almost immediately. And yet, the moment that most clearly announced the tone of this film took place back in Sydney, as Hanna (Garner) tries to buy a drink at a club and finds herself interrupted in turns by various men asking if she’s Swedish, if she’s French, disapproving of her choice of shitty Australian beer to drink, and finally a bartender (also a man) who instantly dismisses her request that he run her [declined] credit card a second time, turning her aside in favor of another dude ordering drinks. Now, her card was in fact maxed out, and the bartender ignoring her in favor of another customer was perhaps understandable. But at the end of this long train of minor masculine annoyances, it just played like the final twist of the knife. Don’t listen to her. Don’t indulge her. Given that she’s not going to fuck you at the moment. Just put her aside and seek your fortune elsewhere, until you’re off work and it’s time to hit on her again.
To the extent that this film had a message, it’s that walking through this world as a woman can be a constant, Kafkaesque trial. And it didn’t need even need to make it to the titular sausage fest flophouse in the middle of nowhere for these women to start to experience it. The Royal Hotel is just the metaphor that allows the audience to hold the patriarchy at a distance. And that’s what makes this film land in such a brutal and devastating fashion. It’s not that there aren’t any pleasant men in this film, or at least, moments of men behaving pleasantly, but all of them behave in ways that are informed by the incentives of the world they exist in – and those incentives encourage constant competition and hoarding of every resource, treating sexual access to women as the greatest resource of all, worth laying our fists into each other like beasts to secure. And whatever excesses they engage in while pursuing these objects – not people surely – are excusable as men acting like drunken, loutish men. And in a world of loud, disgusting, amoral, mendacious boors like Donald Trump and Boof the Rapist holding or pursuing every lever of power, the metaphor of this place lands even more harshly. Because The Royal Hotel is everywhere. And it’s good to be the king.
#8: The Holdovers
Directed by Alexander Payne, written by David Hemingson.
The Holdovers earned its place on this list almost entirely through its performances, as Paul Giamatti‘s multilayered cantankerous professor Paul Hunham is a fascinating enough ’70s character study even before you add in Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the school’s head cook Mary Lamb, a bereaved mother whose adult son was recently killed in the Vietnam War. The pair act as reluctant caregivers for student Angus Tully (debut actor Dominic Sessa), who is left behind over winter break at the prestigious Barton Academy in Massachusetts, where both adults work. Fundamentally, this is an amusing and heartwarming Christmas film about finding family in the least likely of places, and it’s to the film’s credit that it really makes its characters work for it. Truth be told, when I reached the third act, in which the trio goes on a bit of a field trip, I was expecting it to veer into shallow sentimentality. Instead, The Holdovers goes in some genuinely unexpected directions, but in a manner that is thoroughly explained and justified by the narrative and acting choices that preceded it. Yes, this film will make you smile and perhaps cry, but what makes it such a triumph is its presentation of flawed people embracing honest relationships with each other, and the joy they can find in that honesty. No matter how much they abhorred each other at the start.
Saltburn is under arrest, going directly to horny jail, along with everyone who made, watched, or enjoyed it. After two features from director Emerald Fennell, my oddest compliment is that she’s very good at making self-important melodrama. Promising Young Woman tapped a rich well of darkness and sincerity via the deep and longstanding rage of women living in the maw of patriarchy and rape culture – but it was fundamentally a tawdry, pulp revenge fantasy akin to Teeth – its most memorable scene had Britney’s “Toxic” playing, for fuck’s sake.
Saltburn feels tawdry for much of its runtime, but takes a while to explain what sort of revenge fantasy it wants to be, and rides that tension masterfully for its entire runtime. Which is fine, because I was captivated during its first act even before we arrived at the titular manor. Saltburn begins with Oxford scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) becoming friendly with – and then fixated upon – fellow student Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), eventually becoming enmeshed in Felix’s wealthy, aristocratic family. As this Ripleyesque game is playing out, the feelings and motivations of its characters shift in ways that are perceptible, and yet demand a second viewing to see whether you properly understood each interaction as it was happening. Many of Oliver’s actions hover on the cusp between serving some larger, well-defined scheme and simply acting upon a desire to connect, dominate, and get off. And yet he seems like such a harmless, helpless thing at the film’s start – more flotsam than predator – and what a scheme it turns out to be nonetheless.
The story takes place in the mid-00s for no obvious reason – it’s not as if the relationship between wealthy landed gentry and their pauper friends has changed in any major way in the last 15 years. But each member of the family – especially Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and cousin Archie (Archie Madekwe) – is on the receiving end of very particular attention from Oliver, and watching them all throw verbal barbs at each other is quite an entertaining spectacle. I’m talking around what this adds up to because it is a satisfying mystery, although I suspect some will reach the end and find the answer unsatisfactory due to a lack of sympathy for any of these characters. And to that I say: Sympathy is often surplus to requirements. That the characters’ motivations are shifting and dubious makes them feel more real, not less – and that’s quite a statement when discussing a film which frequently borders on farce. It also ends with a dance that must be seen to be believed.
#6: Rye Lane
Directed by Raine Allen-Miller, written by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia
The romantic comedy has been on life support for years, relegated to the sort of artless posturing that gets vomited en masse at Christmastime, selling romance on the basis of extinct, apolitical small-town and holiday vibes entirely external to the individuals involved. At best, the genre has transcended this formula by either embracing it with a bit of self-awareness (as in Somebody I Used to Know) or raising the stakes with a sci-fi or fantasy genre pairing (as in Palm Springs). So you can imagine my surprise and delight to see this debut feature from director Raine Allen-Miller, a talent I will be keeping an eye on in years to come. This Gen-Z romance was written from a script that was originally titled Vibes & Stuff, and this is a decent summation of the romance that erupts in an arts district between a pair of south Londoners, Yas and Dom (Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson), who have an awkward meet-cute in the gender-neutral loo where Dom is crying in a stall about his recent horrible breakup (he calls it The Breakup – that’s how you know it’s recent). They’re both at a weird art exhibition, featuring an artist and mutual friend, Nathan, played by Simon Manyonda, who steals the handful of scenes he’s in, beginning with Nathan warning his tearful friend that if he can’t keep it together, and he’ll have to “sling a sign on [him] and call it performance art”. But Yas and Dom just keep right on vibin, looking at the weird art (with Dom succumbing to peer pressure to buy some) and then wandering out together in the same direction, through Rye Lane Market.
Here in Seattle, we have Pike Place and other such markets (and if I’m being honest, our unwillingness to banish out-of-place cars somewhat limits its appeal beyond tourists), but it’s fair to say that every slightly interesting city has a place like this, and it’s always a prime location for people-watching, grabbing a quick or weird bite, and bonding over a shared feeling of being a part of the city you’re in. For a rom-com or a real date, its built-in production design provides a stellar backdrop for an impromptu wander to bond with a stranger. Yes, I’m showing my urban bias here a bit, but I find this romance of odd hipster happenstance to be far more credible on its face than the city magazine editor returning to Frost Gulch, Wisconsin to bond with a suspiciously well-groomed lumberjack who is silent about where he was on January 6th. A good deal of this is owed to Oparah and Jonsson’s stellar chemistry and charm, but it also relies on the film’s sense of style and self-awareness when it comes to the artificiality of a first meeting like this. Yes, they’re doing a bit of a Before Sunrise here, wandering the city and talking about what matters to them both, but they’re also putting on a bit of a show for each other and the others they interact with, doing an impression (or perhaps an audition?) of a relationship they don’t yet have with each other. And what is a first date, if not that? It’s when these vibes and gestures – hilarious in their own right – give way to the unvarnished truth and emotional vulnerability that it really feels as if these two are connecting, and that journey really is a pleasure to behold. It didn’t needColin Firth to cameo as a burrito truck chef wearing a “Love Guac’tually” t-shirt, but it was nice to see the old guard pop in to give a stamp of approval that this film had already earned on its own. Rye Lane is an hilarious and artful romance. One for the canon.
#5: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, screenplay by Goldstein, Daley, and Michael Gilio, story by Gilio and Chris McKay.
[The] requirement to balance coherent storytelling with freewheeling anarchy might explain why a tabletop RPG like Dungeons & Dragons has some unique adaptation challenges compared to video games (which also have a fairly spotty cinematic record). If you want to adapt a video game, your choices exist on a spectrum between “make a version of the game as played by the best player ever” and “just slap the name onto an generic adventure tale that vaguely resembles it”. Previous attempts to adapt D&D have largely opted for the second method – but this feels like the first attempt to capture the loose, jokey, improvisational chaos that is fundamental to the appeal of the game. You’re telling a story, sure, and that story ultimately has to make some kind of sense. But you’re also making choices ranging from the rational to the ridiculous, and rolling the dice as to the outcomes of those choices. A skilled DM will attempt to balance the madcap randomness of gameplay with the fun and coherence of the story (usually by selectively breaking rules as needed) – and that seems to be the difficult path that these filmmakers chose to tread – or at least convincingly imitate – with the script of Honor Among Thieves. And to my unrelenting delight, it worked.
[…]
If all the best parts of a campaign occurred in a single rowdy, Mountain Dew-soaked night, without any table drama or rules-lawyering or spell slot fuckery – with good ideas rewarded by creative counterattacks from the DM, without every choice succeeding, but each one resulting in the sort of improvised flailing that molds it into an even more insane plan with each moment – it might look something like this movie. And I’d be talking my friends’ ears off about it the next day until they begged me to stop.
Linoleum is a surreal dramedy about Cameron Edwin (Jim Gaffigan), the host of a failing children’s TV science show, à la Bill Nye, and his wife, an aerospace museum curator (Rhea Seehorn, the absolute rockstar from Better Call Saul), who are having troubles and headed for divorce, when a satellite crashes in their backyard, and the TV host decides he wants to try and build a rocket out of it.
The other plotline involves their daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon) who strikes up what might be a romance or a platonic friendship with a new boy in town, Marc (Gabriel Rush). Nora and Marc’s connection is ambiguous for the usual reasons (they’re confused teenagers), but also because as a prior condition, she makes it clear she’s not flirting with him, because she likes girls. But she also finds him interesting and wants to be pals, and the feeling seems to be mutual. Marc’s father is Kent Armstrong, a hardened ex-military man who is about to take over network hosting duties of Edwin’s science show. It’s hard to imagine this man commanding the attention of children in quite the same way as Edwin, and yet…he is also played by Gaffigan? Gaffigan-as-Armstrong is a deathly serious exercise in self-parody, transforming so thoroughly in appearance and manner that I found myself unsure at times whether I really was looking at the same actor. It’s genuinely bizarre as a starting point, and the film only gets stranger from there, despite retaining its earnest streak and heartfelt performances that roped me into the story initially.
The vibe of Linoleum, as well as several of its visual, musical, and thematic tricks, are cribbed directly and unapologetically from Richard Kelly‘s 2001 film Donnie Darko, but it is also very much its own thing. It ends up being a fascinating elegy on childhood hopes and dreams, love, identity, and a lot more – and that is about the limit of what I may say here, because as with Donnie Darko, the outstanding ending of this film ties all of the surreal elements together in a manner that is comprehensible, but not explained perfectly in the text. You’ll walk away feeling as if the journey made sense, but it will decline to answer every question.
#3: Poor Things
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, written by Tony McNamara
Poor Things is in theaters now, and will stream on Hulu at a date yet to be announced.
Lanthimos makes his third appearance in the Glennies and McNamara his second, with the writer-director pair having previously written The Favourite (also starring Emma Stone), which was my favourite film of 2018. McNamara went on to apply his thoroughly debauched and loosely historical eye to The Great on Hulu, which I’ve adored in the intervening years, so naturally I came into this film fully prepared to see what twisted, sexy, violent, and utterly human spectacle he would bring to bear on the sci-fi genre. And yet, I was unprepared for just how much the film would rely upon a single, transformative performance from Stone, who also executive produced the film.
Stone plays…Frankenstein, essentially. A creative amalgamation of a mad scientist and twisted parental figure played by Willem Dafoe. Yes, the first sentence was a pedantry test, and you passed, dear reader. Stone is Bella Baxter, an assemblage of recycled parts made manifest by the dream of a madman named Godwin (“God” for short), who watches her toddle about like a child before bringing in medical student Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) to take notes on her cognitive and linguistic development. The steampunk menagerie in which God operates is utterly depraved to a degree that seems familiar within Lanthimos’ oeuvre (feels like a satellite operation to The Lobster), but which serves a clear narrative purpose. This is a man who sews animals together for scientific fun. He has a half-goose, half-dog. A half-pig, half-chicken. And they all wander around the yard perfectly healthy to show off his crimes against nature, and offer a preemptive explanation for the inevitable question: Why is Bella Baxter? Because when we learn Bella’s origins in the first 30 minutes of the film, there’s no reason why he had to bring her to life in this particular way except that God is a mad scientist, and wanted to see if he could. And yet, in his own way, he was following his own code of ethics in doing so, not violating the will or decisions of his unwitting parts-supplier.
What follows is a Bildungsroman – a chronicle of Bella’s growth, engagement with the world, and gradual intellectual and philosophical awakening as she embarks on a series of romantic and depraved adventures, initially with the rakish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who is as basic and hilarious as he is despicable and unimportant (with an absolute hoot of a performance by Ruffalo). Duncan absconds on a romantic adventure with Bella…in order to fuck and then discard her, obviously, and Bella makes it clear that she knows exactly what use they have in mind for each other. And yet, for all the worldliness that gradually coalesces from Bella’s self-styled “questing nature”, Stone’s performance never fully leaves behind the verbal and physical tics that the character had at her start, nor the innocence with which she approaches every question about why the world is how it is. And it is Bella’s guileless exploration that makes Poor Things so utterly fascinating, as she meets other characters who could have existed as mere mouthpieces for a particular worldview, and yet feel fully formed and appealing as objects of exploration. She finds the most interesting people in the room and becomes one of them in turn, schmoozing with the likes of consummate cynic Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) and brothel madam Swiney (Kathryn Hunter), each of whom acquits themselves well in the handful of moments they have in this film.
Bella finds herself, her friends, and her purpose, and what a wondrous journey of self-discovery and self-possession it turns out to be, with the world itself rendered in a fantastical blend of miniatures and CGI reminiscent of Wes Anderson and yet justified as an expression of how Bella sees the world: full of wonder, despite and because of its myriad horrors and contradictions. Poor Things is a delight, despite its frequent attempts not to be.
#2: American Fiction
Written for the screen and directed by Cord Jefferson, based on the book by Percival Everett.
American Fiction is in theaters, and will be available to stream on Prime Video, on a date yet to be announced.
American Fiction is sincere, hilarious, and a great deal more than the sum of its elevator pitch: that frustrated fiction writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) would adopt an authorial minstrel persona in the form of fictitious fugitive “Stagg R. Leigh” in order to write a pandering pastiche of Black trauma porn, only to see it embraced by the literary establishment and the white world writ large. And the film’s greatest trick is to treat this pitch…as an afterthought to the establishment of Ellison himself – and his family, history, and relationships – as the furiously beating heart of this film. […] Monk doesn’t hide his contempt for the publishing world…at one point demanding on a conference call to the marketing department that his new book be retitled from My Pafology to simply…Fuck. Which, of course, they agree to do, and it only makes the book more buzzworthy. It hardly matters whether an artless exercise in self-parody actually gets read by anyone, as long as it makes for an interesting cover and conversation piece. Monk’s literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) concludes a reading of a racist review of his last book, in which the critic essentially tells Monk to stay in his lane (wondering what the book’s subject matter “has to do with his experience as a Black man”) by commenting that white people think they want the truth, but what they really want is absolution. […] As a critic, American Fiction was a reminder to stay humble. And as a reader of fiction, American Fiction was a reminder that nobody knows anyone else’s life. And sometimes, the richness and texture of that life can be pleasant to immerse yourself in whether or not you can turn it into a grand observation about your own.
It’s rare that I give a film 10/10 – the last such recipient was American Factory (my #2 of 2019), and Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon, while not a documentary, received this nod for a similar reason: it answered a question I didn’t even know to ask, and did so in a manner which left me thunderstruck, unwilling to change a single thing about it. The United States of America is exceptionally good at making tokenistic nods to the sins of its past, but is deliberately less thorough when it comes to connecting that past to present dysfunction and economic inequality, content to maintain a narrative that Americans have always succeeded through skill and hard work, and anyone who is poor and downtrodden probably deserves to be in some way at this point. After all, all those bad things we did to them are in the past, and everyone affected by them is long dead, right? Right?
We’re all quite familiar with this attitude as applied to slavery, but perhaps a bit less so with the myriad mistreatments and indignities that the surviving members of the Indigenous peoples of this continent have had to suffer. After the wars, genocides, forced resettlements, and invasive diseases decimated their pre-Columbian civilizations, shunting tribes onto reservations of the most useless and remote land that the white government could deign to provide was also a fine excuse to ignore them in perpetuity. Imagine their surprise when some of that land turned out to be bubblin’ crude? The resulting oil wealth flowing into the Osage Nation in Oklahoma also brought a flood of white supremacy, ensuring that as much of that money would be clawed back as possible. Because if there’s one thing this country cannot stomach, it’s the wrong people getting rich.
It’s this hands-off attitude toward the uncomfortable and ceaseless tide of history – reinforced by all levels of government and politics for over a century (and currently being aggressively pushed by the know-nothing, iconoclastic resurgence of the white nationalist GOP) – that has caused acts of terrorism like the Tulsa race massacre (which gets an explicit nod in this film) to fail to be taught in schools and not become widely known until the 2010s. The institutionalized abuse of guardianship and a campaign of organized crime and theft against the oil wealth of the Osage Nation in the 1920s is a similar tale, in that I had truthfully never heard of it until this film was made. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? As with the fictitious white world of American Fiction above, I find myself praising this film for its fearless truth-telling, grappling with America’s original sins, even as I know that I’m seeing this story from the perspective of the white people who decided to tell a story that the Osage Nation itself was telling continuously while it was happening, and ever since. The original trite observation about history is that it is written by the victors. And that is true even for the subset of those victors who fruitlessly seek absolution for the life they now enjoy, built upon the shoulders of giants – and trod upon the victims of the same.
Flower Moon‘s powerhouse set of performances include another career-best from Robert De Niro as pimping gangster and gleeful white supremacist William King Hale, and another from Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart – a riveting, classic dumb guy, a Great War veteran with nasty teeth and zero prospects until his uncle decides to set him up as a potential murderous husband to Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman whom they fully intend to murder along with her entire family in order to ensure that her oil rights end up in their white hands. On our podcast, I commented that the film’s sprawling ensemble cast and demystifying of a historical turning point reminded me favorably of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln – but ultimately, its best reminder of that film came with how much preexisting baggage of American history education that I bring to it. Because as a wholly unfamiliar story, the events of this film (of a rein of terror and murder that lasted for years) would already be devastating. But with everything I know of the rise of the global oil industry and its role in building American wealth during the 20th century, it provokes a bit of a knowing nod. “Ah, that makes sense.” While I have nothing but praise for Gladstone’s performance as well as the rich tapestry of Osage life, dress, culture, etc., that is presented in this film (and which the real-life Osage Nation apparently had quite a bit of involvement with), it is hard to come away feeling as if I really know these people or understand their perspective on these events, because we’re essentially just watching them be victimized as part of a true crime drama in which all of the heroes and villains are white, and the victims – however richly they are rendered, are mere props and crying icons.
I truly don’t know how to square this circle, except to say that Killers of the Flower Moon seems well aware of its limitations as a story told by and for white people. And my only hope in lauding the film so thoroughly is that it doesn’t end the conversation about it, because the various peoples at the heart of this film have a lotmoreto sayto anyonewho will listen.
Joy Ride (directed by Adele Lim, written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao)
Dream Scenario (written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli)
Oppenheimer (written and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin)
Nimona (directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, screenplay by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson)
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (directed by Daniel Goldhaber, written by Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, based on the book by Andreas Malm)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham)
Asteroid City (written and directed by Wes Anderson)
LOLA (directed by Andrew Legge, written by Legge and Angeli Macfarlane)
M3GAN (directed by Gerald Johnstone, screenplay by Akela Cooper, story by Cooper and James Wan)
Beau is Afraid (written and directed by Ari Aster)
May December (directed by Todd Haynes, screenplay by Samy Burch, story by Burch and Alex Mechanik)
One of the earliest and most trite observations of my 20s was that authenticity is an overrated virtue. As I’ve gotten older, my opinion has softened a bit – authenticity is indeed a virtue; it’s simply impossible to assess either internally or externally, which renders it meaningless as an article of praise. At worst, authentic is used to describe an unfamiliar cuisine by people who have never eaten it before, often in the same breath in which they describe it as bold, experimental fusion. It gets worse when describing stories – at best, a story might be deemed “authentic” by a non-critic who shares some verifiable life detail with a work’s subject, e.g. a soldier rating another soldier’s memoir as such, often before asserting that no one can truly understand war unless they’ve lived it. Even the people who lived a particular life or in a particular neighborhood or with a particular worldview will be the first to tell you – their people contain multitudes, and nobody’s the same as anyone else. So what is authenticity, really? A stamp of approval of the truthiness of a thing? Confirmation bias as analysis?
I began this review with a discussion of authenticity because it is skewered so thoroughly in first-time film director Cord Jefferson‘s American Fiction (Master of None, Succession, Watchmen), an adaptation of Percival Everett‘s 2001 novel Erasure. If you really want to damage your critical psyche a bit, spend about 15 years reviewing films and then go back and re-read every time you’ve used the word “authentic” in a review. Cringe appropriately. As a current practice, I prefer to judge a work by its perceived sincerity, and American Fiction is sincere, hilarious, and a great deal more than the sum of its elevator pitch: that frustrated fiction writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) would adopt an authorial minstrel persona in the form of fictitious fugitive “Stagg R. Leigh” in order to write a pandering pastiche of Black trauma porn, only to see it embraced by the literary establishment and the white world writ large. And the film’s greatest trick is to treat this pitch – almost certainly the reason why it has attracted such buzz in the wake of its audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival – as an afterthought to the establishment of Ellison himself – and his family, history, and relationships – as the furiously beating heart of this film.
When Monk ends up on a forced hiatus from his academic position after excoriating a white student for complaining a bit too much about the presence of the N-word in a class on literature of the American South, he returns home to his ailing mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), and is joined in turns by his adult siblings, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) – both doctors, and both recently divorced. This family is solidly middle-class bordering on upper, and – like many American families, just one medical crisis away from financial ruin. And so the family comes together, their history spelled out so plainly from the first interaction that I wanted to stew in it, because these people are as wryly hilarious as they are deeply damaged. Ross is a particular delight, having to establish a sibling dynamic with Wright in just a few utterly charming scenes in which these two make it clear that despite being out of touch and having serious shit to deal with in their lives, they still love and like each other, and are genuinely thrilled to be back in each other’s orbits. Brown, meanwhile, plays Cliff as the black sheep of the family, off his head on cocaine in half his scenes, and exploring his newfound identity as a divorced, gay, Black man, having only lived a third of that out loud so far, and experiencing pain and pleasure in equal parts at the freedom and pathos of finally letting his family know the entirety of himself. Cliff is very much not the focus of this story, and yet it is a testament to Brown’s performance that this character feels so fully realized. His life is a mess, but it goes on when the camera stops rolling. So it is as well with Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), the family’s longtime housekeeper and caregiver, who is rightly and mutually seen as part of the family, even as she finds herself the only maternal figure remaining as Agnes’ health begins to fade. And again with Coraline (Erika Alexander), an attorney and public defender who lives across the street from the family’s beach house, mid-divorce herself, and as eager to strike up a hasty, casual fling with Monk as he is to find a distraction from his deep well of career disappointment and self-loathing. These people exist outside of Monk and he outside of them, and yet they sketch out a life that is fully realized both onscreen and implicitly before the film began. I can’t speak to their authenticity, but they sure felt real as I watched them. And I spent so much time laughing aloud at their biting humor – as well as uncomfortable moments where the laughter was just a discomfited placeholder for incoming pathos – that I hardly had time to ponder what purpose they served as archetypes. I just wanted to live with these people for a bit, and hear what they had to say.
Where Wright really shines is in his character’s capacity for both self-awareness and self-deception. From his first scene, he is utterly in command of both screen and classroom, and yet, he has so much anger stewing beneath the surface that he feels fit to burst (and ultimately does burst, kicking off the film’s plot). And yet, Monk has had a fortunate career and he knows it. He writes books that are sold in chain bookstores – albeit not with the kind of regard he wants. “The only thing black about this book is the typeface,” he says to a store clerk as he moves his book out of the “African-American fiction” section, even as the clerk assures him that he has no choice about the placement and that he’s just gonna move em back as soon as Monk leaves. Monk has written works that he is personally proud of, but he can’t continue to sell them to an increasingly monolithic and tunnel-visioned publishing world that only wants one specific narrative from Black writers: the Real Black Experience. By which they mean…a ghetto. Poverty. Drug abuse. Crime. Murder by the police. And slavery, if it’s a period piece. This version of Black fiction is represented in the film by a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who also fits the bill of characters who appear in Monk’s orbit fully-realized and yet feel as if they have a life outside of it. Sintara went to Oberlin and grew up well off, and touts the authenticity of the AAVE and patter in her book by saying she based her book on “real interviews”. This is the Michael Lewis of poverty tourism fiction authors – she hasn’t lived it and doesn’t really understand it, but…she sure can sell it. And she’ll defend herself persuasively to your face if you dare to try and make her feel bad about giving the market what it wants.
It is to the film’s credit that it really doesn’t take a position on whether Sintara’s mercenary attitude is any less dysfunctional and twisted than Monk’s self-important sense of discontent. Monk doesn’t hide his contempt for the publishing world nearly as well as Sintara does – at one point demanding on a conference call to the marketing department that Stagg R. Leigh’s new book should be retitled from My Pafology to simply…Fuck. Which, of course, they agree to do, and it only makes the book more buzzworthy. It hardly matters whether an artless exercise in self-parody actually gets read by anyone, as long as it makes for an interesting cover and conversation piece. Monk’s literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) concludes a reading of a racist review of his last book, in which the critic essentially tells Monk to stay in his lane (wondering what the book’s subject matter “has to do with his experience as a Black man”) by commenting that white people think they want the truth, but what they really want is absolution. This sort of cynicism is well-earned by the film’s plot, even if it taps out a bit at the end into a Kaufmanesque discussion of how the story should end for the audience they’re trying to sell it to. Monk playing ball with this discussion almost feels like he’s come around a bit to Sintara’s way of thinking, but it’s hard to forget how much he talked down to her about it without even deigning to read her book for himself. They’re both pretty awful in this moment, and yet, not nearly as awful as the white people praising Fuck for its authenticity. As a critic, American Fiction was a reminder to stay humble. And as a reader of fiction, American Fiction was a reminder that nobody knows anyone else’s life. And sometimes, the richness and texture of that life can be pleasant to immerse yourself in whether or not you can turn it into a grand observation about your own.
This review originally appeared as a guest post on 10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective, a film site in which editor Marcus Gorman and various contributors revisit a movie on the week of its tenth anniversary. This retro review will be a bit more free-form, recappy, and profanity-laden than usual.
“What the fuck is this?” -“It’s actually pretty good. It was made by this Danish woman in the ’70s. It’s probably not what you’re used to looking at, but it’s pretty hot.” “OK, look, I have a girlfriend, all right? So…” -“I’m sorry, did you think I was hitting on you? Because I’m not… I thought you could use something better than that shit you’re watching on your phone. …am I right? If you have a girlfriend, why are you watching dirty movies?” “You’re fuckin’ weird, you know that?” -“I don’t entirely disagree, but you’re the one who’s gonna pretend you’re texting while you watch people pretend they’re fucking on your phone.” “The shit I watch on here? They’re not pretending.” -“Of course they are!”
Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Esther (Julianne Moore), having a little chat in public about porn, as I’m about to do with you.
All of the actual porn clips that appear in Don Jon are cropped narrowly enough to get the film an R rating, but its dialogue is unrestrained in both obscenity and depth when it comes to discussing all things pornographic and masturbatory. The 1994 Kevin Smith film Clerks settled the question of whether theatrical movies can discuss sexuality in such candid terms without getting an NC-17 rating, via an argument made by legendary creep and fascist-coddler Alan Dershowitz, spawning an all-timer for that “worst person you know made a great point” meme. But even as no-account New Jersey fuckboy Jon Martello, Jr. (Gordon-Levitt) explains in exquisite detail each step in his several-times-daily ritual of porn and self-pleasure (noting that the sound of his MacBook booting up gets him hard as a fucking rock), it still feels transgressive, because most candid discussion about sexuality is either preposterous (like the FiftyShadestrilogy) or in pursuit of a quick joke, never offering any real insight into sex where a brief, discomfited chuckle will do. And don’t get me wrong; Jon’s monologue is as hilarious as it is off-putting, but it never feels shallow. Jon describes masturbation like he’s ascending to Nirvana: “All the bullshit fades away…I don’t gotta say anything, I gotta do anything. I just fucking lose myself.” And that honest feeling of disconnection from his sexual partners seems worth exploring, whether or not his attitude about porn is cause or mere symptom.
This film was originally titled Don Jon’s Addiction and even premiered at Sundance under that title, and its creator’s acquiescence to the distributor’s title change makes me wonder just how confident he was about that “addiction” framing. JGL took to Facebook on that occasion and opined that he didn’t want people thinking the movie was about porn addiction and sex addiction, which is fair enough, and was probably about the limit of my understanding at the time. While Jon does try and fail to stop watching porn at his girlfriend’s behest, and another character questions whether he ever tries masturbating without it, nobody ever actually refers to this common behavior as an addiction, but rather treats it like what it is: A thing lots of people do, which can be done in excess. If you ask the professionals, the answer is pretty definitive – sex addiction does not appear as a distinct disorder in the DSM or its international equivalents. My own state’s coalition of sexual assault prevention programs (WSCAP) published a discussion guide to accompany Don Jon, and the word “addiction” does not appear in it even once. The consensus of scholarly and professional opinion is that sexuality is an ordinary human behavior expressed in a variety of ways, and attempting to isolate “sex addiction” as a distinct disorder serves to pathologize ordinary human behavior in a way that is both counterproductive to treatment for better-defined mental health conditions which might encourage illegal, disruptive, or upsetting sexual behavior, and also used as an excuse by policymakers and religious conservatives to isolate and pathologize ordinary expressions of sexual behavior that they deem undesirable and seek to repress as a means of cementing their political power. The entire LGBTQ community can tell you about that one.
So in the same way that Jon is forthcoming with the audience about what he gets out of his quotidian jerk sesh, so too is Don Jon honest about the limitations of its scope: Jon has very little at stake except his own maturity when it comes to sex and relationships, and consequently, the film plays less like a social document and more like a coming-of-age flick for horny twenty-something dudes who kinda need to get their shit together. And that is a fine and uncommon thing. It’s the rare indie gem, like Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions or Bill Condon‘s Kinsey, which discusses sexuality with any honesty, and even then, it’s usually in pursuit of some greater storytelling or biographical objective which justifies this odd moment in which we normie, God-fearing, uptight Americans find ourselves discussing sex when we’re all clearly too uncomfortable with the topic to do so. So I have to give some credit to JGL for crafting and portraying a character who is…essentially no one in particular except…a young American bro who likes watching porn between going to church to confess about it, and having sex with a parade of women he meets at The Club with The Boys, occasionally punctuated by a shouting dinner with his parents (Tony Danza and the late and excellent Glenne Headly) and his almost entirely taciturn sister (Brie Larson) about how his life is off-track and he’s a terrible football fan. That’s to say, JGL is putting himself forth through a fictional lens as a basic douchebag, and then putting that good-lookin fella on camera to confess to us, his friends beyond the fourth wall, that he doesn’t even really enjoy sex that much, and prefers the noble path of Onan and Pornhub. And lest we run the risk of liking him too much, he even troubles a one-two punch of suggesting that women can become hot enough to avoid having to give blowjobs and referring to men who enjoy performing the act of cunnilingus as “fucking crazy”.
Now, I’ll leave to the reader’s imagination whether and how often my tongue does a glissando – and it’s fair to say that men’s performative outrage at anyone questioning their watercress-grazing skills usually exceeds their true aptitude down south. But it’s also fair to say that Jon’s early and repeatedly-expressed desire to get head (as well as a variety of coital positions) without providing any reason why a partner would want to do so is presented to the audience as both an unlikable characteristic and a symptom of Jon’s dysfunctional attitude toward his own sexuality. Jon’s problem isn’t that he likes porn – and it isn’t that he’s dating a woman, Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who doesn’t trust or even particularly like him (feelings which seem to be mutual anyway). It’s that he doesn’t really understand how to connect with other humans on a deep emotional and physical level, and sees porn as an outlet that doesn’t even make him try. And all it asks in return is for us to occasionally, shamefully acknowledge that it has a better claim to invention of the internet than Al Gore.
Back to Jon’s opening monologue for a moment. He describes the feeling of ejaculating to the perfect porn clip as “losing himself”. And why not? If you’re all alone, and you lose yourself, who’s left? The contrary view is embodied by Esther (Julianne Moore), a woman of the world who lost her husband, child, and any remaining verbal filter over a year before she meets Jon at night school and casually fucks him in her Jeep Wrangler. And it is in naked conversation with Esther that we finally see another human giving and receiving the kind of honesty that Jon had never thought about pursuing before. Relationships, she explains, are reciprocal. And all of Jon’s myriad dysfunctions – which Esther freely admits she wouldn’t tolerate if a meaningless hookup with a beefy bro weren’t something she sorely needed right now – are simple enough to explain: Jon has only ever pursued one-sided relationships, in which he gets whatever he wants – his pad, his ride, his girls (always rated on the 10-scale) – and he thinks little for anything he ought to give in return. This is why he was willing to accept a different sort of one-sided relationship with Barbara, who has very particular ideas about who he should be and how he should act – many of which are presented as facially reasonable, if Jon really is ready to settle down, and really wants to settle down with her specifically. I really have to hand it to ScarJo for a brilliant performance as a character who has to act in a deeply unlikable way while also being treated unfairly and misogynistically by the film’s protagonist. Barbara fits the mold I often call “more concept than character”, representing a version of henpecked, marital femininity as rendered by men who are terrified of finding a woman they deem hot enough to make them suppress their baser nature for a while. It’s a very particular and stereotypical view of how (immature, cishet, monogamous, marriage-inclined) men and women think and act towards each other, but even for its limited intended scope, this examination feels self-aware. The heteros are upsettero*, and in the course of explaining their gross feelings, we not only get to bask in Johansson’s wicked charm, but also get a breathtaking quasi-sex scene in a hallway which is perhaps one of the best pieces of physical comedy either actor has ever performed. We also get Brie Larson in the film almost exclusively to confirm, through female lips, that “that girl has her own agenda” and “she doesn’t care about Jonny” – fine and true bits of subtext which perhaps betrayed a lack of confidence that the audience would clock that both of these people are behaving with immature emotional intelligence and communication skills which they will both, hopefully, eventually, grow out of. Apart from losing a bit of my own verbal filter when it comes to discussing sexuality (adding a bit more candor, vulnerability, and empathy to my existing repertoire of the grotesque and the profane), those are precisely the skills I’ve put the most personal effort into improving over the last decade, because they seem essential to becoming a well-functioning human.
And like Tyler Durden said, self-improvement is masturbation. Meaning it’s fine and everyone should get on it. Pretty sure that’s what he meant.
FilmWonk 