Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya are star-crossed lovers in Dune: Part Two
When I recently rewatched David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune with filmmaker Mars McKay, we agreed that Lynch had omitted one of Frank Herbert’s most important themes. In Lynch’s version Paul Atreides, a nobleman from a decimated great house, is in hiding from his enemies on the desert planet of Aarakis. When he’s rescued by the nomadic Fremen, they discover that he is their prophesied messiah, and he leads them to victory over their Harkonnen oppressors, and in the process, they install him as emperor of the galaxy. It’s a standard Chosen One narrative, like King Arthur or Star Wars.
But in his 1965 novel, Frank Herbert makes it clear that the whole situation is a setup. Paul’s mother Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, an all-female order of space witches who are the power behind the throne on hundreds of worlds. Over the course of centuries, the Bene Gesserit spread a belief in a coming messiah on many worlds, while they secretly manipulated dynasties in order to breed a psychic superbeing called the Kwisatz Haderach. When their demigod is finally born, he will have an army ready to serve him no matter where he goes.
Paul knows this, and wants no part of it. He has visions of billions of people killing and dying in his name, and tries desperately to avoid his fate. His victorious ascendence to the galactic throne is actually a defeat.
Denis Villeneuve understands that Paul’s interior conflict is central to the emotional impact of the story. The mounds of burning bodies from Paul’s visions are the most indelible image of Villeneuve’s 2021 Dune, and the creeping dread of jihad hangs over Dune: Part 2 like smoke from the funeral pyres.
Paul Maud’Dib rallies the Fremen in Dune: Part Two. (Courtesy Warner Brothers)
The first installment ended with Paul and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) joining the Fremen tribe led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Part Two begins light years away in the palace of Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken), who is starting to think that helping House Harkonnen ambush House Atreides was a mistake. His daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) writes in her journal of rumors that Paul survived the massacre.
Meanwhile, on Arrakis, Stilgar’s band fights off Harkonnen attacks as they head for the relative safety of the deep desert. Paul’s guerrilla war in the desert — which Lynch’s version all but omits — provides some of the most thrilling sci-fi action in recent memory, even before Paul becomes Muad’Dib by riding a giant sandworm through the desert.
Bardem’s magnetic performance proves crucial. Stilgar steps in as a jovial father figure to the grieving Paul. But he’s also a Fremen fundamentalist who takes the prophecies seriously, and Lady Jessica makes sure he sees Paul as the “voice from outside” who will lead them to victory and make Dune green again. Chani (Zendaya), the beautiful warrior who takes a shine to Paul, sees the would-be Mahdi for what he is. “You want to control people? Tell them to wait for the messiah to come,” she spits.
Paul and Chani’s love story is heartrending. They cling to each other as the currents of history threaten to pull Paul away from his humanity. If they can kick the Harkonnen off the planet without calling millions of Fremen religious fundamentalists to jihad, maybe they could make a life together in the aftermath. But when Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) replaces Harkonnen commander “The Beast” Rabban (Dave Bautista) with his more competent cousin Feyd (Austin Butler), the Fremen are backed into a corner, and holy war becomes the only way out.
Sandworms attack in Dune: Part Two. (Courtesy Warner Brothers)
Dune is the product of Herbert’s very 1960s obsessions with religion, desert ecology, and psychedelic mushrooms. Nevertheless, it has only become more relevant over the 60 years since its first publication. One need not look far to find leaders cynically using religion for political gain, or sparking savage wars of extermination by appealing to ancient scripture. The clarity Villeneuve brings to this multilayered story is its own kind of miracle, and he’s able to do it without sacrificing the visceral action blockbuster cinema requires.
None of this heady stuff would mean much without the human element. From Dave Bautista’s petulant manchild Rabban to Josh Brolin’s crusty warrior Gurney, everyone in the sprawling cast delivers. Rebecca Ferguson is especially creepy as she whips believers into a frenzy while mumbling conversations with her unborn child.
But Zendaya and Chalamet are the beating heart of Dune: Part Two. It ain’t easy to draw real human emotions out of such fantastical material, but these two movie stars make it look like it is. Like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, they try to carve out a little solace in the midst of war, only to find out the problems of two little people ain’t worth a hill of beans in this crazy galaxy.
Geologists divide time into epochs, which can last tens of millions of years. The end of one epoch and the beginning of another is marked by clearly definable features in the geological record, such as the layer of extraterrestrial iridium laid down at the end of the Cretaceous by the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs. All of human history has taken place in the Holocene epoch, but recently, the effects of climate change and industrial society have led scientists to the conclusion that we are living in a new epoch. The Anthropocene is defined as the time when human actions became more important to the state of planet Earth than natural activity. The Anthropocene’s beginning is represented by a layer of radioactive fallout from Cold War atomic bomb tests which will remain visible in the soil and rocks for millions of years.
The first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico in July, 1945, and the man history calls its father is J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was a brilliant physicist who had led a titanic effort to win a war by harnessing the very essence of the universe. Twenty years later, as the growing nuclear arsenals of the United States and the USSR threatened humanity with mass extinction, Oppenheimer was interviewed on television about what it was like when his bomb went off. He said he remembered a quote from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is about how a person can go from the pinnacle of scientific achievement to a hollowed-out husk of a man trying to atone for the evil he unleashed on the world. The three-hour epic, shot on IMAX film stock specially formulated for the task, is ostensibly based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But Nolan owes a conceptual debt to Michael Frayn’s Tony-award-winning drama Copenhagen. Frayn used repetition and multiple points of view to tell the story of a fateful conversation between physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of the Nazi nuclear program, and his mentor Niels Bohr, who was about to flee to the United States.
Nolan takes us through Oppenheimer’s rise and fall from two different points of view: One POV, titled “Fission,” is Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) defending his life choices to a committee which would ultimately revoke his security clearances and end his career. The other POV, titled “Fusion” is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, as he faces a Senate confirmation hearing to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Fission, which covers Oppenhimer’s chaotic personal life and the development of the bomb, is in color, while Fusion, which details the anti-Communist witch hunt which destroyed him, is in black and white.
In the color memories, Murphy embodies the quiet, enigmatic charisma described by those who followed Oppenheimer into the darkness of Los Alamos. In the creamy black and white of Fusion, he becomes the skeletal embodiment of the industrial death machine. Downey is unrecognizable as the duplicitous social climber Strauss. Matt Damon is outstanding as Gen. Leslie Groves, the back-slapping Army Corps of Engineers officer who is in way over his head overseeing the Manhattan Project. Jason Clarke gives the performance of his life as Roger Robb, the attack dog prosecutor who exposes Oppenheimer’s darkest secrets.
Nolan’s always had problems writing female characters, so the women don’t have much to work with. Emily Blunt is all drunken hysterics as Kitty Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh puts up a good fight as Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s doomed Communist mistress.
The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientist’s queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done.
If only the whole movie were that great. Oppenheimer is both too long and has too many cuts—a cinematic quantum paradox! At times, Nolan seems acutely aware that he’s making a movie about a bunch of weirdos writing equations on blackboards for years on end. He tries to spice things up by editing dense conversations about physics, philosophy, and politics like frenetic action sequences. In one gorgeous shot, we see Oppenheimer finally alone with The Gadget that will define a new geological epoch. It should be the tense calm before the storm, but Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame bury that gold in a blizzard of mediocre images. I found myself wishing Ludwig Göransson’s relentless, pounding score would just chill for a minute. The nonlinear structure that works so well in Copenhagen hobbles the forward momentum, and makes the complex story even more confusing.
Oppenhiemer is a return to form for Nolan after the fiasco of Tenet. There’s a great movie hiding amidst all of the formal pyrotechnics. But I guess it’s too much to ask for a lighter touch from a director who is about as subtle as an atomic bomb.
Florence Pugh, left, and Morgan Freeman in A Good Person. (Credit: Jeong Park/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)
Unlike many people of my generation, I am still dazzled by movies. I am in awe of actors’ and directors’ capacity to make fabricated moments between strangers seem so real. Good filmmakers know the ways to pull at people’s heartstrings, whether through loss, nostalgia, intense emotion, or serious monologues. While I stand by that statement, director Zach Braff somehow manages to create a story that includes death, addiction, mental illness, abuse, and Morgan Freeman, which is ultimately unable to produce any semblance of emotion. In fact, instead of leaving A Good Person with a newfound appreciation for life, I found myself wishing I’d left earlier.
The film begins with a typical trope: A happy family is suddenly struck by tragedy, which divides them until they meet some quirky character who is able to lift them up again. A Good Person opens with a newly engaged couple, Allie (Florence Pugh) and Nathan (Chinaza Uche), whose happiness is quickly destroyed by the death of Nathan’s sister, Molly (Nichelle Hines), and her husband as a result of a car crash with Allie as the driver. After the accident, the camera focuses on Nathan, looking distraught as Allie, lying in a hospital bed, comes to and is confronted with the reality of her actions. Then we cut to Allie some years later, no longer engaged, living with her mother, and suffering from a prescription painkiller addiction.
The problem with this opening is that we don’t know who these characters are, so we don’t care. In fact, we don’t even find out the name of Nathan’s sister until the final moments of the movie. It doesn’t help that there is zero romantic chemistry between Pugh and Uche, evidenced by the uncomfortably forced kiss they share. We can’t see what she has lost. Similarly, the relationship between Allie and her own mother, Diane (Molly Shannon), mimics an abusive neighbor who occasionally drops in, drinks, and yells at Allie.
Enter Morgan Freeman.
Freeman takes on the role of Nathan’s dad, Daniel, and caregiver to Molly’s child, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor). Faced with previous problems with addiction as well as the loss of his daughter, Daniel reverts to alcoholism as a coping mechanism. To work through his problems, he begins to attend weekly AA meetings, where he sees Allie for the first time since the accident. Immediately and without explanation, Daniel forces himself to befriend Allie. As a result, Allie begins to confront the life she left behind and create a friendship with Ryan. From here, one would expect the movie to follow the typical ups and downs that come with narratives of addiction, broken families, and unlikely friendships. Instead, Braff decides to swerve off into irrelevant side plots, and we are left with entirely different conclusions.
Braff’s got a stable of good actors, a time-tested movie trope, and realistic issues that affect society, yet somehow nothing works. While some might blame the cast for the lack of emotional connection between characters and the audience, their efforts are wasted by the meandering screenplay. The addiction subplot romanticizes Allie’s struggles—the scenes where she relapses are framed with flashes of happy memories, bright lights, and dance music. Towards the end of the movie, Freeman’s character almost murders a 20-year-old boy in cold blood. Multiple scenes are accompanied by Florence Pugh singing. Why? I couldn’t tell you. The awkward dialogue at times seems improvised. I felt visceral cringe when characters uncomfortably talk over one another and ignore blatant social cues. By the end of the film, I wondered if the screenplay was a first draft.
Maybe it was because I was just glad the movie was wrapping up, but I found the ending to be the best part. Mostly because one of Freeman’s strengths— god-like narration—was finally utilized. Better late than never, Freeman’s narration is meant to convey a sense of peace and closure. It gave me the strength to quickly scamper out of my seat and out the door. Thanks, Morgan Freeman, for at least doing your part.
Florence Pugh carries Don’t Worry Darling. Harry Styles, not so much.
The new film Don’t Worry Darling has been overshadowed by the off-screen drama between director Olivia Wilde and stars Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, and fired star Shia LaBeouf. That’s a shame because the film’s message is applicable to contemporary feminism and society. There’s a lot more to it than just the controversy.
The story focuses on a young married couple, Jack (Harry Styles) and Alice (Florence Pugh), who are living a “perfect” life. Alice goes about her day preparing meals for her husband, having a drink ready for him when he arrives home, and satisfying his sexual needs. What Jack does when he’s not at home with Alice is the subject of some mystery. It all seems to be going swimmingly, until Alice starts asking questions: Where does he go every day? Why does she have to live subordinate to him? Why are they even there? But Alice’s questions are met with gaslighting. The men around her portray her as mentally unstable, even dangerous. When Alice’s friend Margaret (KiKi Layne) asks the same questions, she is driven to suicide and taken away from society. When Alice asks what happened, she is told not to worry, that Margaret and her husband were just having a little trouble. Alice’s curiosity about her world, that is both familiar and unsettling, will lead to shocking revelations and bloodshed.
The strength of Wilde’s direction lies in her world-building. She uses long shots of Alice and Jack’s cul-de-sac to express the habitual routines that define the societal structures that keep everyone in their place. She focuses on the details of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and ballet classes that frame Alice’s empty days. Wilde fills the film with symbols, characters, and dialogue which point to the men’s abuse of power.
Florence Pugh is the most engrossing aspect of Don’t Worry Darling. The brilliance of emotions she displays draws you deeper into this strange world. Whenever Alice felt pain, fear, or confusion, I found myself feeling the same emotions in the pit of my stomach. When Alice finally decides to act on her vague suspicions, Pugh walks us through her fear, despair, and resolve.
Another strong performance is by Chris Pine, who usually plays a clean-cut prince. He and Wilde play with your expectations, turning Pine’s character Frank into a dark, godlike figure who appears to hold the answers to the mysteries of this world. Wilde finds the hidden layers of Pine’s personality that were only glimpsed in his previous hero roles.
While Pugh and Pine are excellent, the oppressed housewife role is overplayed. What saves Don’t Worry Darling from a potentially dull plot line of suburban conformity and gender expectations is the shock ending. I won’t spoil it here, but when walking out of the theater, I found myself repeatedly saying, “Wow. Holy crap. Wow. That was —.”
The film’s biggest problem is the miscasting of Jack. Like any other Gen Zer, I have a special place in my heart for Harry Styles as a singer. But for a story so laden with meaning, casting a teenage heartthrob as the male lead turns out to be a very bad choice. Styles can sing, but he can’t act. Often, I found Styles’ facial expressions inappropriate for the emotions Jack should be experiencing. For example, when Alice says she wants to leave their life, she weeps into Jack’s arms and cradles his hands whilst tears stain her dress. Jack, two inches away from Alice’s blushed face, has not a single tear, semblance of emotion, or even eye contact with Alice. This happened many times in scenes where emotion was essential.
In the end, the positives outweigh the Harry Styles-shaped negatives. For me, Don’t Worry Darling is a must-watch for its powerful evocation of feminist values, and the lengths some men will go to in order to feel superior to the women in their lives. Wilde’s themes are best summed up by a minor character’s final words. As Shelley (Gemma Chan) uses a kitchen knife to take charge of her life, she hisses, “You stupid, stupid man.”
Don’t Worry Darling Now playing Multiple locations
Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanov in Black Widow.
First of all, Black Widow should have happened five years ago. It took eleven years — from Iron Man in 2008 to Captain Marvel in 2019 — for Disney super-producer Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe to make a solo super-movie starring a female superhero. In the interim, Warner Brothers filled the void with 2017’s Wonder Woman, the only good movie made from a DC property in a decade.
Considering how aggressively mediocre Captain Marvel was, it’s especially galling that it took so long for Scarlett Johansson to get her own starring vehicle as Natasha Romanoff From a character standpoint, Natasha is the most interesting of the Marvel A-team. Trauma has always inflected the best superhero origin stories. (Did you know Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him? Someone should put that in a movie.) She was trained from childhood to be an elite assassin and intelligence operative by the Red Room, a secret Soviet super-soldier program notorious for its brutal methods. Somehow, the stone cold killer’s conscience survived the ordeal, and she defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., where she became Nick Fury’s most trusted confidant. Alone among the Avengers as a non-super-powered (albeit surgically enhanced and relentlessly conditioned) human, she feels pain when she gets hit. Thor the space god is cool, but he’s one-note. Natasha’s adamantium-tough exterior hides a broken person, deprived of human connection, riven with guilt for all the “red on my ledger,” trying to balance the books with world-saving good deeds. But she’s always gotten short shrift. During The Avengers iconic Battle of New York, the prototype for all the Marvel Third Acts to come, Black Widow was fighting flying, laser-firing aliens while armed only with a pair of pistols. Couldn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. at least get her an assault rifle?
Natasha’s emotional potential is realized in Black Widow’s unexpectedly moving cold open. It’s 1995, and she’s living in suburban Ohio with her mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) and sister Yelena (played as a 6-year-old by Violet McGraw). Just as they’re about to sit down for an ordinary, wholesome family dinner, father Alexei (David Harbour) comes home with bad news. Turns out, the family are deep-cover spies, and their cover’s been blown. As the fake family rushes to get to the escape plane to take them to Cuba, Natasha stares longingly out the window, saying a silent goodbye to the closest thing to a normal life and human connection she will ever have. Her family may be fake, but it felt real to her.
Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh as super-sisters Natasha and Yelena in Black Widow.
Fast forward to 2016. (The film itself recognizes that it’s late. Natasha died in Avengers: Endgame, so Black Widow’s story takes place while she was on the lam after the events of Captain America: Civil War.) Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh) is hunting a target who turns out to be another member of the Black Widow program. After Yelena strikes a mortal blow, the dying Widow exposes her to a red gas that undoes the chemical mind control regime the Red Room has imposed on her. Yelena goes rogue, stealing the remaining doses of Widow antidote, and sending them to her estranged, faux-sister Natasha for safekeeping. Instead of spending her downtime watching Moonraker — naturally, Natasha’s an obsessive James Bond fan — she decides to track down Yelena, and the pair team up to kill the Red Room mastermind Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and dismantle the Widow program once and for all.
With director Cate Shortland at the helm, Black Widow is the best superhero picture since Black Panther. It’s not just an acceptably entertaining Marvel product, but an actual good film in its own right. The second-act action set piece, when Natasha and Yelena break their pretend-father Alexei out of a Siberian prison, stands with the airport brawl from Civil War as an all-time, kinetic highlight of comic book cinema.
David Harbour as Red Guardian
It’s Johansson’s movie (she’s executive producer), but she leads an ensemble cast. Natasha’s been making life-or-death decisions since she was a teenager, so Johansson plays her with a deep world-weariness. She has zero time for petty bullshit; in 2021, I find Natasha’s emotional exhaustion extremely relatable. Pugh is her kid-sister foil, knowing exactly where to needle to get a rise out of the ice queen. The comic relief is left up to Harbour as the Red Guardian, Captain America’s Soviet counterpart gone to seed, still bitter about losing the ideological struggle with the West.
Black Widow’s ideology is overtly feminist. It’s a quintessential female gaze movie. The women are sexy, but not subject to a leering camera; the men are either buffoons or sniveling abusers. The stakes and scale are remarkably restrained by Marvel standards. Natasha, a subject of unthinkable patriarchal abuse, is fighting to give other victims the kind of agency she was denied. Left to her own devices, Black Widow doesn’t choose to save the world from xenocidal aliens. Her heroism serves a more practical, down-to-earth purpose.
The March sisters: Meg (Emma Watson), Amy (Florence Pugh), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen)
For Never Seen It, I convince someone interesting to catch up on a classic (or maybe not so classic) film they’ve missed, then we talk about it. This time around, I got the boss, Anna Traverse Fogle, CEO of the Flyer‘s parent company Contemporary Media, to watch director Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which was 19 on my list of the 25 Best Films of the 2010s. Our quite lengthy conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Chris McCoy: What do you know about Little Women?
Anna Traverse Fogle: Book or movie?
Chris: More like, what is your relationship with Little Women?
Anna: I remember reading the book when I was a fairly young person myself. I was one of those kids who the librarians would laugh at because I would walk up to the librarian’s desk with a foot-tall stack of books. And they’re like, “You’re not going to read all of those, little girl.” And I was like, “You watch me.” I was pretty young, which means both that it made something of an impression on me, and also that I don’t remember it all that well. I remember the characters to some extent. I remember liking the beginning, and I remember it kind of losing my interest at some point. When I was in the earlier portions of the book, I was more like, “These are characters I can relate to.” And then as they got older, I think maybe I couldn’t relate as much. I certainly remember thinking of them — this is a child’s perception — but sort of in the same way that I had a relationship with a character than, like, the Laura Ingles Wilder books. I was not thinking about them critically, but thinking more in terms of who am I the most like. Whose personality traits do I want to be? So I was thinking about it in that very inner kind of way.
Chris: I think for a lot of girls, for a long time, the question of which of the March sisters you’re like was kind of like which of the Hogwarts houses you belong to.
Anna: Or which of the Sex and the City girls you relate to. And somehow, once you have identified which archetype of young woman you are, then you will understand other pieces of information that you would like to have about yourself.
Chris: Okay. Let’s do this.
Acting!
135 minutes later…
Chris: Anna Traverse Fogle, you are now someone who has seen Little Women. What did you think?
Anna: I mean, it’s changed me as a person.
Chris: Okay! That’s great!
Anna: It brought back more of the book that I realized was still in my head. Although I don’t know enough that I could speak to the distinctions between book and film. I don’t remember that the book did any of the temporal switching, which I found … I kind of got around it over the course of things. But you know, I’m a sleep-deprived, addle-minded person today. There were a few moments in the beginning when I was like, where are we? Then I clued in. I mostly liked that, but I did find it took a little bit of getting used to for me.
Chris: I think that was the big thing [director] Greta [Gerwig] brought to it, because she was hired to write the screenplay. And when [producer Amy Pascal] read the screenplay, and then saw Lady Bird, she was like, “Yeah, you should just direct it.”
Anna: I thought it ended up working really well — and added texture. It made it something other than just, “Let’s try to do a somewhat faithful adaptation of a much-beloved book.” It made it feel more like something that made sense as a film. That’s not something I think would have worked as well in any other format. In terms of, how do we re-imagine this novel as a film, that, to me, really made it something that felt like a work of cinema, and not like, “Let’s sit around and talk about how I like the book better. Well yes, of course everybody likes the book better. This made them operate more like independent works of art.”
United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson
Chris: You’re gonna have to cut a whole lot from the book no matter what you do. I think the genius of the way she structured it is that you don’t realize what’s gone until it’s over.
Anna: Right. Because you aren’t watching it unfold from beginning to end. It turns it into this kaleidoscopic experience where it’s like, now I’m here, now I’m here, now I’m here. So you’re getting all of these elements, but you aren’t like “Oh gosh, They left out that bit I remember really well from the book,” because it’s coming at you in a different sequence.
Chris: She really handled the transitions so well. I mean, you’re a writer and editor. You know what a hard job that was.
Anna: Yeah, no kidding. And again, this is going to go back to how very long it’s been since I read the book, but I feel like there are some elements of the book that everybody probably remembers that she ended up having to decide, that’s not going to make it into the film because that’s going to take us off into some other direction that isn’t going to work. But I thought in terms of the spirit of the characters, it very much captured each one of their personas.
Chris: The casting just could not be better.
Anna: If you had some mental image of these characters in your head from when you read Little Women when you were 12, these people somehow are them. The casting job has to be really good if Meryl Streep is there, and you’re sort of like, “Oh yeah, this is Meryl Streep.”
Chris: She’s an important character, but not one that you actually see all that much of, relatively speaking.
Anna: She’s not stealing it. Nor does she want to. She’s someone who can be that character.
Chris: Aunt March is so great, and I love how Greta deploys her because this can be a saccharine or at least a very sweet story. But whenever it starts to get too sweet, you get a little bit of Aunt March. She literally one time says, “I’m so sick of this,” and rolls her eyes and walks off.
Anna: Right! If things are getting a little bit too sentimental, and isn’t it great, and they love each other so much and blah blah blah … Well, let me give you some witty rejoinder and caustic remark. And then we can return to what we’re here to do.
Chris: Her job is to take the piss out of the thing.
Meryl Streep takes no guff as Aunt March.
Chris: I personally am a Jo, even as a guy. Because she’s a writer.
Anna: I mean, she is such a writer, and I have to say, perfect for my little literary slash editor slash book junkie heart. Before I was working in media, I did a stint as an undergrad as a very, very low-level helper person at the University Press. All of these things combined to make these scenes of the book creation process so meaningful. When Jo’s locking herself in the attic, as someone who writes, I both understand what impels her to do that, and I can never imagine having a moment in my life when I can give into it. Who has that kind of time, to lock themselves in an attic for several days and write reams of pages? I liked the great shots of all of the pages she’s got lined up on on the floor. And then later when the book is being put through the printing press and assembled and stitched and the cover is being attached to it, I was like …
Chris: Oh yeah! The book-binding montage just killed me this time.
Anna: It made me wish that, instead of cooking shows, there would just be shows about, “Now I’m going to put together a book and show you how.”
Chris: I would so watch that.
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle (3)
Chris: The only casting that pulls me out of it is Bob Odenkirk as the dad. I mean, he’s great, but …
Anna: The character is a little out of place.
Chris: Nobody cares about the dad. We get to know this group of people as a self-sustaining entity, and then all of a sudden, “Oh, he’s back!”
Anna: Marmee has a husband, and they have a father, and he’s in the house. But he’s a little bit like, wandering over to the corners, like “Where do I fit here after all of this?” I guess that was actually the way it was meant to be.
Chris: Yeah, I agree with that. At one point in my note — you know, I take note, because I’m a pro-fessional — I have “0.0% male gaze” … This is a movie made by women, about women, for women.
Bob Odenkirk as Father March
Anna: You’re probably right that it’s for women. I’d be curious to look at the gender breakdown of the theatrical audiences. I have a sense that if you’re in an opposite sex relationship, probably more women were dragging their male partners to see it than vice versa. Maybe that’s just my assumption.
Chris: I think when I saw it in the theater that I was the only male there. [Laughter] I loved it, though, because it’s such a perfect movie. There’s not a wasted scene.
Anna: I had a few moments where I felt like it almost felt like the actors were clearly people in 2019 speaking the dialogue of people 150 years ago. It didn’t happen very often. For the most part, it felt very natural coming out of their mouths.
Chris: Well, the naturalism of the acting comes from mumblecore. Greta Gerwig came up from the American DIY underground. She was an actress in Joe Swanberg movies. That’s the only thing to really survive from that movement, how the dialogue overlaps. That’s very modern, very Robert Altman.
Anna: I did notice the people talking over each other. It felt very natural. Of course people who happen to be living in the 19th century wouldn’t magically have always waited their turn in line to speak, especially if they’re in a room full of their families. But I think that’s often how our film versions of novels, or just films that are set in quote unquote “the olden days.” You know, I say my nicely crafted line and then give you sufficient air space to say your nicely crafted line, and we just go back and forth. Nobody talks like that. I doubt people ever have. I love the sense that the dialogue really felt like spoken dialogue.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn
Chris: She has fun with it. So many of these classic works, I think when people approach them, they are kind of intimidated by them. They’re like, “I have to have a reverence for this work.” And it sucks the fun out of it. You see that in lit classes all the time. But all these women are having just a blast. It shows in a movie, to me, when the actors are actually having fun.
Anna: I have to think this was probably so refreshing for everyone involved. This goes back to what you were saying about the absence of the male gaze. I’m sure that translated every day they were on set. Like how are we going to put this thing together? I don’t know, but we’re gonna figure it out and we are not being subjected to anybody’s opinion but ours. We don’t have to feel the burden of that set of expectations, and let it play out in the way that feels natural.
Chris: And nobody’s gonna get naked. Timothée Chalamet, who is Laurie, he’s the babe in this movie — the man-bimbo.
Himbo Timothée Chalamet as Theodore ‘Laurie’ Laurence.
Anna: If anything, there is a little bit of the opposite of male gaze there. It’s like, “Okay, yeah here’s this guy. He’s going to be the love interest. But let’s not actually make him too interesting or too engaging.” He always feels a little bit, frankly, not quite up to par.
Chris: He’s a drunken lout for about half the movie.
Anna: Well, there is that. But like once he’s not, he still feels a little bit like he wants to be on their level, but he’s not.
Chris: Yeah, there’s a feeling that Amy settles, even though she says she’s been in love with him the whole time.
Anna: He didn’t always quite realize that. It did feel a little bit like she was thinking, “Okay, well, I guess I need to make something happen. So here’s this guy I’ve known for a long time. I guess it’s kind of in the cards, so here we go.” Jo, of course, is like, “I think I would be perfectly happy never to marry. Well, it’s not perfectly happy, but maybe that’s my destiny. I can accept that, and I can do other things. I could have interesting pursuits, and I can craft a life for myself.” I think having that level of understanding and independence and ability makes it easier for her to forge a path.
Chris: She is sort of a proto-modern woman. She’s the one that you can relate to the most from the 21st century, because she wants to have a career.
Anna: That’s not going to be an either/or proposition for her, between having a career and having love interests she pursues. I think in any scenario, she takes the career, if it becomes an either/or thing. That’s not something that was all that acceptable. We talk about the 21st century, but if it becomes an either/or thing between finding someone marriageable or having an interesting and fulfilling career … Well, it is certainly not an assumption for everybody that women are going to necessarily pick the career.
Chris: That’s the point of Amy’s speech. The actress who plays Amy is Florence Pugh, and that speech, “Marriage is an economic proposition,” she plays it to perfection.
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle (2)
Anna: That felt so finely crafted and yet quite believable that that would be coming out of her mouth exactly the way it emerged. It would have been perfect if she had delivered that in any format. It’s something that, if she prepared to send in a letter, and labored over it for hours, she could not have done better.
Chris: That was such a moment of absolute, deep-down clarity. I think she sees herself better than Jo sees herself. For all of Amy’s faults, and you could say that she’s a retrograde or reactive character, but she understands herself better than anybody else in the whole story.
Anna: I mean she seems to be someone who was like, “Okay, look I’m not I’m not at the same level that you know that Jo is, but I’ve got this going for me, and I can make these decisions, and I think I can make this work.” I think that comes along over the course of things. Part of the beauty of that speech is that you’ve seen some of it developing in her, but at that moment you’re like, “Okay. Yeah. This is exactly how she’s thinking.”
Chris: And also, that line Laurie has right before the speech, “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses?” That really rings.
Anna: But in his case, it’s an accidental truth, know what I mean?
Jo and Laurie take a walk in the New England countryside.
Chris: Would you recommend this movie to other people?
Anna: Yeah, I totally would. I had fully intended to see this movie when it came out and didn’t. I will tell you I don’t go to that many movies in the theater, so for me even to have considered the possibility of going is an indication that I was quite interested. Honestly, most of the movies we were going to see in the theater are something in the Marvel universe with my stepson. But yeah, I would absolutely recommend it to really anybody. It’s easy to say that, if you happen to fall into a similar demographic as me, or if you’re interested in feminism, blah blah blah … And yes, this is a movie for you if you just like New England and autumn! It made me really miss living in Massachusetts.
Chris: How long did you live in Massachusetts?
Anna: Only three years. I was in grad school up there, but felt very at home. I lived in the Boston metro area, but it’s so easy to drive into those little towns where the fall is the most beautiful fall you’ve ever seen. There’s just something about that you can’t duplicate anywhere else. There were a few moments where I was like, “Oh gosh yes, I need to go back to New England in the fall.”
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle
