Tag: Jessie Buckley

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Film Features Film/TV

2020 on Screen: The Best and Worst of Film and TV

There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.

Steve Carrell sucking up oxygen in Space Force.

Worst TV: Space Force

Satirizing Donald Trump’s useless new branch of the military probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But Space Force is an aggressively unfunny boondoggle that normalizes the neo-fascism that almost swallowed America in 2020.

John David Washington (center) and Robert Pattinson (right) are impeccably dressed secret time agents in Tenet.

Worst Picture: Tenet

Christopher Nolan’s latest gizmo flick was supposed to save theaters from the pandemic. Instead, it was an incoherent, boring, self-important mess. You’d think $200 million would buy a sound mix with discernible dialogue. I get angry every time I think about this movie.

We Can’t Wait

Best Memphis Film: We Can’t Wait

Lauren Ready’s Indie Memphis winner is a fly-on-the-wall view of Tami Sawyer’s 2019 mayoral campaign. Unflinching and honest, it’s an instant Bluff City classic.

Grogu, aka The Child, aka Baby Yoda

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Grogu, The Mandalorian

In this hotly contested category, Baby Yoda barely squeaks out a win over Buck from Call of the Wild. Season 2 of the Star Wars series transforms The Child by calling his presumed innocence into question, transforming the story into a battle for his soul.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

Most Inspiring: Hamilton

The year’s emotional turning point was the Independence Day Disney+ debut of the Broadway mega-hit. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop retelling of America’s founding drama called forth the better angels of our nature.

Film About a Father Who

Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who

More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.

Cristin Milioti in Palm Springs

Best Comedy: Palm Springs

Andy Samberg is stuck in a time loop he doesn’t want to break until he accidentally pulls Cristin Milioti in with him. It’s the best twist yet on the classic Groundhog Day formula, in no small part because of Milioti’s breakthrough performance. It perfectly captured the languid sameness of the COVID summer.

Soul

Best Animation: Soul

Pixar’s Pete Docter, co-directing with One Night in Miami writer Kemp Powers, creates another little slice of perfection. Shot through with a love of jazz, this lusciously animated take on A Matter of Life and Death stars Jamie Foxx as a middle school music teacher who gets his long-awaited big break, only to die on his way to the gig. Tina Fey is the disembodied soul who helps him appreciate that no life devoted to art is wasted.

Jessie Buckley

Best Performance: Jessie Buckley, I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Buckley is the acting discovery of the year. She’s perfect in Fargo as Nurse Mayflower, who hides her homicidal mania under a layer of Midwestern nice. But her performance in Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending psychological horror is a next-level achievement. She conveys Lucy’s (or maybe it’s Louisa, or possibly Lucia) fluid identity with subtle changes of postures and flashes of her crooked smile.

Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, and Jonathan Majors in Da 5 Bloods.

MVP: Spike Lee

Lee dropped not one but two masterpieces this year. Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the jungle, the kaleidoscopic Vietnam War drama Da 5 Bloods reckons with the legacy of American imperialism with an all-time great performance by Delroy Lindo as a Black veteran undone by trauma, greed, and envy. American Utopia is the polar opposite; a joyful concert film made in collaboration with David Byrne that rocks the body while pointing the way to a better future. In 2020, Lee made a convincing case that he is the greatest living American filmmaker.

Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul

Best TV: Better Call Saul

How could Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s prequel to the epochal Breaking Bad keep getting better in its fifth season? The writing is as sharp as ever, and Bob Odenkirk’s descent from the goofy screwup Jimmy McGill to amoral drug cartel lawyer Saul Goodman is every bit the equal of Bryan Cranston’s transformation from Walter White to Heisenberg. This was the season that Rhea Seehorn came into her own as Kim Wexler. Saul’s superlawyer wife revealed herself as his equal in cunning. If she can figure out what she wants in life, she will be the most dangerous character in a story filled with drug lords, assassins, and predatory bankers.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss in Shirley.

Best Picture: Shirley

Elisabeth Moss is brilliant as writer Shirley Jackson in Josephine Decker’s experimental biographical drama. Michael Stuhlbarg co-stars as her lit professor husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who is at once her biggest fan and bitterest enemy. Into this toxic stew of a relationship is dropped Rose (Odessa Young), the pregnant young wife of Hyman’s colleague Fred (Logan Lerman), who becomes Shirley’s muse/punching bag. If Soul is about art’s life-giving power, Shirley is about art’s destructive dark side. Shirley is too flinty and idiosyncratic to get mainstream recognition, but it’s a stunning, unique vision straight from the American underground.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons in I‘m Thinking of Ending Things.

I recently rewatched an old favorite: Being John Malkovich. The 1999 comedy, written by former sitcom scribe Charlie Kaufman and directed by Beastie Boys video maker Spike Jones, is a surrealist take on the corrosive effects of celebrity culture. It’s a comedy, sure, but that label is somehow too limiting. It’s the height of 90s indie weirdness as a kind of high art.

Kaufman and Jones would reunite for 2002’s Adaptation, which twisted Susan Orlean’s nonfiction bestseller The Orchid Thief into an unrecognizable pretzel. Then Kaufman wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which, in the hands of Michael Gondry, became a film on the short list for best of the 21st century.

Awkward! Jake and Lucy meet the parents, Toni Collette and David Thewlis, in one of the most awkward dinner scenes imaginable.

But after the financial crisis of 2008, Kaufman-esque surreality seemed to go out the window. Arthouse and indie films became much more neo-realistic, in part because the mid-budget movie became an endangered species as studio dollars flowed towards megabudget “sure things” based on recognizable intellectual properties. You know, superheroes.

One of the great side-effects of the streaming era has been giving new life to strange voices like Kaufman, and allowing creativity to take flight. One of the earliest examples of this was Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, a Greek comedy/musical about street violence, which was produced by Amazon. Now Netflix has made a film with Kaufman that simply couldn’t exist in the contemporary Hollywood studio system.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like Adaptation, a loose adaptation of a book — this time, a 2016 novel by Iain Reed. Kaufman doesn’t insert himself into the story this time, but then again, Orleans inserted herself into her narrative of the eccentric Floridian swamp ranger, so it was only fair. That being said, there’s very little about this film that is conventional in any sense.

The story starts on a long car ride through a snowstorm. Lucy (Jessie Buckley) is staring out the window, contemplating how her young relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons) is unsatisfying. They eventually arrive at his parents farmhouse, where she meets his mother (Toni Collette) and his father (David Thewlis), and the family shares an awkward dinner. Then, as it’s getting late and the snow is piling up outside, Jake and Lucy head back to the city. As they pass a small side road, Jake insists on a detour to see his old high school, over Lucy’s objections.

Ice cream? In a snowstorm?

And that’s pretty much the whole plot of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but it tells you almost nothing about the film. It is dense, extremely wordy, and at times stubbornly elusive in meaning. Also, there’s a dance sequence.

Buckley excels in one of the most difficult parts you can imagine. Her character’s identity is elusive and ephemeral. Her name seemingly changes again and again. At one point, she does a full-throated impression of legendary film critic Pauline Kael, reciting passages from her review of A Woman Under The Influence. It’s a stunning technical performance.
Plemons’ performance is exceptional. His vacant Nazi enforcer is often overlooked in Breaking Bad, because it’s just another great performance on a screen crowded with them. Here, his gifts are on full display. He even sings songs from Oklahoma! (What is it with the Rogers and Hammerstein thing lately?)

Did I mention the animated sequence?

Kaufman, who also directed, has constructed one of his strangest scripts. It’s almost Becket-like in its mixture of mundane details and slippery symbology. At times it descends into pastiche, sampling texts as strangely disconnected as David Foster Wallace essays and A Beautiful Mind. I’m not going to attempt to explain its meaning. I suspect the writer(s) would insist the attempt to do it for yourself is the point of the exercise. Nor is it a puzzle movie that will click into clarity as soon as you discover and assemble all the clues, although it does have that aspect. The key question to ask if you’re looking at it from that perspective is, who is imagining whom? In that way, it’s about how we construct our identities, and how fragile our mental houses of cards really are.

As a director, Kaufman is a better than average composer of strange images, but his words do miss the visual flash of Gondry and Jones. Ultimately, I’m not sure I’m Thinking of Ending Things comes together in the way that Eternal Sunshine or Anomolisa does. But I have been thinking about it for a couple of days now. It’s a big, sprawling, uncompromising vision from one of our most talented writers. Just don’t go into it expecting to come out with easy answers.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is streaming on Netflix. 

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

Chernobyl

Proving that everything’s coming up ’80s in 2019, the most relevant show on television right now is HBO’s Chernobyl. The number four reactor at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power plant exploded on April 26, 1986, releasing as much radiation as a smallish nuclear war. The environmental catastrophe that followed killed thousands and rendered roughly 1,000 square miles uninhabitable by humans for the foreseeable future. But it was almost much, much worse.

Created by writer/producer Craig Mazin, Chernobyl tells the story of the epic disaster in five episodes. Mazin combed through the official Soviet histories for the big-picture details, but many of the individual incidents depicted came from Voices from Chernobyl by Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich.

The first episode, “1:23:45,” begins with the suicide of Dr. Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), the nuclear physicist in charge of first containing and then investigating the accident. Before he hangs himself, he leaves behind a suicide note that states in no uncertain terms who was at fault for the accident.

One of the reasons Chernobyl is so successful is its intricate structure. Legasov’s final act sets the tone for the rest of the show, where the act of telling vital truths is punished again and again. The story of the worst nuclear disaster in the history of humankind is a huge, sprawling tale involving tens of thousands of people, each with their own motives, biases, responsibilities, and handicaps. This is the sort of story the early Soviet filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein, excelled in telling; there’s more than a little bit of Battleship Potemkin‘s DNA in Mazin’s scripts.

When Mazin and director Johan Renck flash back, it’s not to the very beginning, but instead to the big bang. The interior of the nuclear power plant’s control room shakes violently, and everyone wonders what happened. Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter), the director on duty of the night shift, doesn’t panic so much as get annoyed. It’s clear that his chief concern is not assessing the situation and containing the damage, but how he’s going to explain this screw-up to the higher-ups. All he can think of to do is just throw some more water on the reactor while recriminations fly among the staff. He refuses to accept that the pumps he needs to move the water have ceased to exist. The most affecting scene in the show’s early going is when Dyatlov orders control room engineer Sitnikov (Jamie Sives) to check the state of the reactor “with your own eyes” long after it’s clear to everyone in the room that it has exploded and is currently on fire. He proceeds across the blasted catwalk at gunpoint like a man forced to walk the plank. The next episode, we see the skin sloughing off his face.

People being catastrophically unable to fit what they see with their own eyes into their blinkered worldview is another recurring theme in Chernobyl. The reactor wasn’t supposed to be able to explode, so when it clearly did explode, no one could comprehend it, so crucial time was lost, and people got killed. The most tragic story of this series, which is nothing but a collection of tragic stories, belongs to firefighter Vasily Ignatenko (Adam Negaitis). The dashing young man is among the first responders on the scene, where he sees his comrades drop like flies under the intense radiation bombardment. His young wife Lyudmilla (Jessie Buckley) moves heaven and earth to be by his side, only to find her actions have doomed their unborn child. (Alexievich, who uncovered this story in her book, described Lyudmilla’s testimony as “Shakespearean.”)

Renck’s recreation of the decaying Soviet state is a stunningly realistic mural of decaying infrastructure and bad haircuts. The cliffhanger that bridges episode 2, “Please Remain Calm,” and episode 3, “Open Wide, O Earth,” where the entire fate of eastern Eurasia depends on whether or not three doomed volunteers crawling under the blazing reactor can unclog a drain, outdoes any of the year’s horror movies in terms of sheer tension. After that, the series turns into a whodunit, and we learn the series of errors that transpired before the story started.

Ultimately, the reason Chernobyl has hit a nerve in 2019 America is the creeping sense of dread it evokes. Though unmistakably set in the totalitarian communist environment of the Soviet Union, the parallels to our late-stage capitalist moment are obvious: those in power looking past looming environmental disaster because acting to prevent it might threaten their social status; scientists and educated experts ignored in favor of political expediency; and, most dangerous of all, a political culture that prefers leader-flattering lies over hard truths. Like those who lost Chernobyl, we have the knowledge and means to prevent catastrophe but lack the political will.

Chernobyl
Available to stream on HBO