From Barbie to Spider-Man, Across the Spider-Verse to Killers of the Flower Moon, the art of cinema in 2023 was triumphant.
The movie business was in chaos in 2023, but the art of cinema was triumphant. Audiences rejected expensive corporate blandness in favor of films that took chances and spoke from the heart. But before we get to the best of the year, let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum.
What’s worse than one Ezra Miller? Two Ezra Millers.
Worst Picture: The Flash
2023 was the year the superhero bubble finally burst. Warner Bros. scrapped Batgirl to bet the farm on walking PR disaster Ezra Miller. They lost $200 million on what is easily the worst film of the decade so far.
The King of the Monsters tearing up the club in Godzilla Minus One.
Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Godzilla
It was looking like Cocaine Bear’s year until the King of Monsters dropped an all-timer. The big guy dazzled in Godzilla Minus One by getting back to his roots — punishing mankind’s hubris with cleansing atomic fire.
Teo Yoo and Greta Lee tug heartstrings in Past Lives.
Best Original Screenplay/Best Ensemble: (double tie) May December, Past Lives
Todd Haynes and Celine Song both constructed delicate hothouse dramedies around a core of three fantastic actors. In Haynes’ May December, Natalie Portman is an actor researching a juicy role who discovers her subjects, played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton, can’t be reduced to two dimensions. In Song’s Past Lives, Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are childhood sweethearts in China separated when one family immigrates to America, and John Magaro is the husband caught in the middle when they reunite 24 years later. Both stories are told with remarkable economy, and perfect performances.
The gang starts a fight club in Bottoms.
Best Comedy: Bottoms
College friends Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott, and Ayo Edebiri teamed up for this wicked high school satire about a pair of loser lesbians who start an after-school fight club to get laid. The young cast is razor sharp, and it features the year’s most unexpected comedic performance by NFL legend Marshawn Lynch.
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
Biggest Bomb: Oppenheimer
We’re not talking box office — Christopher Nolan’s three-hour experimental film about a nuclear physicist who loves Hindu literature made $954,000,000 — we’re talking actual explosive devices. The Barbenheimer phenomenon proved that audiences are hungry for something different and are smarter than studio execs give them credit for.
Nicholas Cage kills as Dracula in Renfield. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
MVP: Nicolas Cage
Cage has frequently been the best part of uneven films. In 2023, he was an uncanny Dracula in the otherwise forgettable Renfield and a reluctant psychic celebrity in Dream Scenario. The man’s a national treasure.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Best Animated Film: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
An astonishing visual achievement requiring a record 1,000 animators, the film escaped the superhero doldrums with a witty script and the best cliffhanger in recent memory.
Emma Stone turns in a career performance as Bella in Yorgos
Lanthimos’ Poor Things.
Best Performance: Emma Stone, Poor Things
The Best Actress category at the Academy Awards is going to be awfully competitive. My favorite was Emma Stone as a creature with the body of a grown-up and the brain of an infant. Her progression from peeing on the floor to discussing philosophy in the salons of Europe is as technically challenging as it is emotionally compelling.
Margot Robbie as Barbie.
Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Barbie
Directors wear many hats, and none wore them better than Gerwig, the first woman to ever helm a billion-dollar picture. Balancing the satirical edge of Barbie with pathos and empathy while also staging sweeping musical numbers and recreating the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a rare feat. How did she get all that stuff past the studio?
Lily Gladstone, Robert DeNiro, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Best Picture: Killers of the Flower Moon
In an extraordinarily good year for cinema, Martin Scorsese’s epic of love and betrayal among the Osage stood above the rest. What started as a story about the birth of the FBI opened into an examination of the soul of America. At the center of this maelstrom of greed and exploitation is an unlikely love story between Leonardo DiCaprio’s thick-headed bushwhacker and the extraordinarily coy Lily Gladstone as the wealthy Native American woman his Machiavellian uncle, played by Robert DeNiro, has marked for death. Scorsese switches genres at will, going from romance to Western to howcatchem to courtroom drama, and nailing every beat. Along the way there are several deeply committed performances by Native American actors, and stunning cinematography which shows the 81-year-old Scorsese is still eager to experiment.
When the curtain rises on Indie Memphis 2023 at Crosstown Theater on Tuesday, October 24th, it will be into a film world in chaos. For the art of cinema, it’s the best of times. The financial success of films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Barbie, and Oppenheimer have proven that audiences are hungry for original ideas after decades dominated by corporate blandness. For the film business, it’s the worst of times. Tensions within the increasingly consolidated industry came to a head this year with twin strikes against the studios by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG/AFTRA).
Like the old saying goes, the problem with the art of film is that it’s a business, and the problem with the film business is that it’s an art. In a world where so much film discourse is devoted to the business end, Indie Memphis artistic director Miriam Bale’s job is to foreground the art. “A lot of what we do as programmers is to try to have something for everyone, but also be really selective, so that no matter what you go see, you’re gonna have a good experience,” she says. “We’ve always tried to keep those very DIY, slightly weird, funny, and bizarre films that are so important to our identity. But in the last few years, we’ve expanded to have a lot of bigger titles and more international titles — the whole art house and beyond.”
One of the highest profile films screening at this year’s festival is American Fiction (Oct. 26th, 5:30 p.m.). Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who tries to expose the shallow stereotypes embedded in media by writing a satirically bad book that leans heavily on tired Black tropes. But instead of exposing the publishing industry’s hypocrisy, Monk finds himself perpetuating it when the book becomes a bestseller. Cord Jefferson, who won a writing Emmy for HBO’s Watchmen, makes his directorial debut adapting Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. “A piece of art has never resonated with me so deeply,” he says.
He says Network and Hollywood Shuffle were his inspirations as he tried to set the perfect tone for this difficult material. “I don’t want this movie to feel like we’re scolding anybody,” he says. “I wanted to make sure the satire never traveled into farce. I wanted it to feel authentic to real life.”
May December
Among the other hotly anticipated films is Todd Haynes’ May December, starring Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, and Natalie Portman, whose performance is already attracting Oscar buzz. Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (Oct. 28th, 5:50 p.m.) is a comedy/drama about a hapless English archeologist who falls in with a crew of unscrupulous grave robbers. “Those are two of the best films I’ve seen all year,” says Bale.
One of the festival’s goals, Bale says, is “redefining prestige. We do that with some of the new films we play, but we also do that with some of the older films we play.”
When deciding how to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, Bale says, “I’ve noticed a lot of organizations are showing the classic documentaries on hip-hop. We wanted to find a different way to mark this important anniversary. Two just absolute bangers are Friday and Belly.”
Friday
One of the GOAT stoner comedies, F. Gary Gray’s Friday (Oct. 27th, 6:20 p.m.) launched Ice Cube’s film career. Belly (Oct. 27th, 10:30 p.m.), by music video legend Hype Williams, features Nas, DMX, and Method Man as New York gangbangers expanding their empire. “What’s interesting about those films is that they influenced indie film, but they were both by music video directors before they got big, and they’re starring rappers.”
“We’re always evolving,” says Bale. “I’m always listening to feedback. After the pandemic, we had a lot of heavy films. So this year we’ve leaned more to the comedy.”
The festival is truly redefining prestige with a tribute to the Wayans Brothers, including White Chicks (Oct. 28th, 6:10 p.m.) and Keenen Ivory Wayans’ 1988 Blaxploitation romp I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (Oct. 29th, 4:45 p.m.), which Indie Memphis executive director Kimel Fryer says is her mother’s favorite movie. “I am a huge Wayans fan,” Fryer says. “I don’t know if anyone knows that about me. I have literally seen every Wayans movie, good, bad, or ugly.”
Bale’s mother recently passed away, and in tribute to her on what would have been her birthday, the final film of the festival will be one of her favorites: Joe Versus The Volcano (Oct. 29th, 9:30 p.m.), the 1990 cult surrealist comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (in three roles).
It’s a perfect fit for Indie Memphis’ eclectic spirit. For 26 years, it’s been the only place in Memphis where you can see unique films like Czech director Vojtěch Jasný’s film The Cassandra Cat (Oct. 29th, 11:15 a.m.). “It’s about a cat with sunglasses, who takes off his sunglasses and literally sees people’s true colors,” says Bale. “If that doesn’t sell you, I don’t know what will.”
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
The opening night film has a special connection to Indie Memphis. Writer/director Raven Jackson was the recipient of Indie Memphis’ 2019 Black Filmmaker Residency for Screenwriting.
Originally from Tennessee, Jackson lived in Memphis for two months while finishing her screenplay, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Academy Award-winning filmmaker and Indie Memphis alum Barry Jenkins judged the applicants that year, and once Jackson was finished, he took her under the wing of his production company Pastel. “We do a lot of things at Indie Memphis, but to watch a film go from seed to this incredible flower has been just so rewarding,” says Bale.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
“The way that everything came together is really beautiful,” says Fryer, who saw the film at its Park City, Utah, premiere. “I’m at Sundance for the first time ever, and I’m a first-time executive director from Memphis. I’m completely out of my element. I walk in, I watch this film, and I felt like I was back at my grandma’s house. … I have never seen rural America portrayed as beautifully as this, especially with Black people at the helm. It brought tears to my eyes.”
The film tells the life story of Mack, a young Black woman who grows up in 1960s Mississippi. Jackson uses long, meticulously composed shots to take the viewer inside Mack’s memories of love, loss, and connection. “Some films you watch, right? But some films you experience,” says Fryer.
Jackson and her cinematographer Jomo Fray will be in attendance for opening night on Tuesday, Oct. 24th, at 6:30 p.m. Then on Wednesday, the pair will be at Playhouse on the Square for an in-depth discussion about the film and their process. “The [Terrence] Malik comparisons have come up, but really, I feel like it’s doing something different,” says Bale. “People are having such emotional responses. She made something kind of new, and I can’t think of anything more exciting than to witness the birth of it.”
Thank You Very Much
As I watched Alex Braverman’s fantastic new portrait of comedian Andy Kaufman, Thank You Very Much (Oct. 29th, 2 p.m.), the word I kept writing in my notebook was “deconstructed.” Kaufman took apart stand-up comedy, TV variety shows, professional wrestling, and even human behavior itself, and then reconstructed something new (and often disturbing) out of the pieces. It’s a tribute to Kaufman’s commitment to the bit that when he died in 1984 at age 35, many people believed it was yet another put-on. “It is a daunting, overwhelming subject matter to try to tackle,” says Braverman, who self-identifies as a Kaufman superfan. “But what could be more fun?”
Braverman managed to get unparalleled access to Kaufman’s best friend and writing partner Bob Zmuda and his girlfriend Lynn Margulies. “We were lucky enough to catch them at a time when they had spent decades having a lot of fun with the legacy, but now they really just wanted to tell the true story as best they could. … Bob in particular has access to a lot of material, some of which people are familiar with and some of which people haven’t seen before. A lot of that material’s in the movie.”
Thank You Very Much
Kaufman denied he was a comedian (he claimed to be a “song and dance man”), and many have suggested he was a performance artist. This notion is reinforced by some of the rarest film the documentary uncovered: a faked, onstage confrontation between Kaufman and Laurie Anderson. “I think they just saw in each other some sort of connection or kindred spirits,” says Braverman. “I don’t think that term ‘performance artist’ was really in his mind at the time, but he was coming from a discipline that was more about creating an experience for people and getting them to react to what he was doing, more than it was about, ‘How do I be funny?’”
Anderson and Kaufman’s bit presaged Kaufman’s obsession with professional wrestling, which would eventually land him in a ring in Memphis with Jerry Lawler. “There’s some spiritual connection between Andy and Memphis,” says Braverman, pointing out that Kaufman wowed with a dead-on Elvis impression on the first episode of Saturday Night Live. “As far as the wrestling connection goes, he was really ahead of his time, in a way, as far as understanding how we like our entertainment in this country. It’s good-versus-evil, extreme showmanship at all costs.”
I Am
“The quality of the Hometowner Features is growing every year, so the selection process gets harder,” says Bale. “The films this year are very strong, but also so diverse, with documentaries and comedies and horror.”
This year’s Indie Memphis presents eight feature-length films made in Memphis. Princeton James’ psychological thriller, Queen Rising (Oct. 26th, 9 p.m.), and George Tillman’s documentary about Club Paradise, The Birth of Soul Music (Oct. 28th, 10:30 a.m.), are screening out of competition, while six films will compete in the juried Hometowner category: Lee Hirsch’s vérité documentary about Crosstown High, The First Class (Oct. 27th, 7:30 p.m.); Jaron Lockridge’s voodoo horror, The Reaper Man (Oct. 25th, 9 p.m.); Alicia Ester’s historical essay, Spirit of Memphis (Oct. 28th, 3 p.m.); Joann Self Selvidge and Sarah Fleming’s sweeping issue doc, Juvenile: 5 Stories (Oct. 27th, 6 p.m.); Sissy Denkova’s Bulgarian immigrant comedy, Scent of Linden (Oct. 29th, 12 p.m.); and Jessica Chaney’s testimonial mental health documentary, I Am (Oct. 25th, 8:30 p.m.).
I Am
Chaney says I Am began when she was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder just before the 2020 pandemic. Her therapy regimen caused her to “seek community for people who are going through the same thing, and understanding that you’re not alone in your feelings and what you’re experiencing. I think the worst thing for anything that you’re going through — whether it be physical, medical, mental, whatever — is to isolate yourself.”
Chaney enlisted Amanda Willoughby, her co-worker at Cloud901, as producer. Their proposal for a short film won a competitive $15,000 Indie Grant at Indie Memphis 2021. But as they shot, it became clear they had a feature length film. “We were surprised by how good every interview went,” says Chaney. “We got so much more than we anticipated, sat with every woman much longer than we anticipated.”
“Jessica was still gung-ho on this being a short, and I was like, ‘Jessica, I’m the editor. It’s all going to fall on me. We don’t have to pay anybody. We got so much stuff. Let me do this!’” says Willoughby. “It took some arm pulling, but she was like, ‘Okay, I trust you.’ And I’ve lived with that hard drive. It goes everywhere with me because I have constantly put so much work into it.”
Willoughby says collaborations with Crystal DeBerry, life coach Jacqueline Oselen, and composer Ashley K. Davis made the film stronger and reinforced one of its most important messages. “I’ll just say I learned that there are a lot more people that want to help you than you think.”
“We’re presenting these stories from these women, and it’s not all gloom and doom,” says Chaney. “There’s hope. Every last woman gives hope.”
Donna and Ally
Street-level, DIY comedies, made with little more than a camera and determination, have been a staple of Indie Memphis since the very beginning. It’s the perfect festival for the world premiere of Donna and Ally (Oct. 27th, 6 p.m.). The film follows the titular pair of best friends as they try to make their way through the Oakland, California, underworld as sex workers. Donna’s got a legendary bad temper, which is attractive to a certain kind of client. The problem is, Donna’s mean streak is the result of premenstrual dysphoria disorder, which writer/director Cousin Shy describes as “PMS on steroids,” so she’s only good as a dom for a couple of weeks a month.
Shy says the film is inspired by real life. “I spent some time growing up in the [foster care] system, and a lot of those kids were bigger than life, just really fun. They’re geniuses in their own way. I found one of the leads, Ally—her name is Qing Qi online—and she just has this bigger-than-life presence.”
Donna and Ally
Shy is a Bay Area native who has both worked for Apple and as a first responder. “I worked on an ambulance, and that actually was some inspiration for Donna and Ally,” she says.
When we first meet the pair, they run away from a Catholic foster care home to avoid being locked up on a 5150. “Regardless of where they are in life, and what they go through in their trials, they love each other, and they’re on this journey. You really don’t even see how that’s affecting them in the movie because I think it’s just their life, and they’re laser-focused on becoming somebodies and having that happy ending. So, it’s a comedy.”
Donna and Ally’s obsession with social media stardom leads them to ridiculous circumstances. “A lot of kids, especially kids from the underclass, are just like, ‘I feel like I’m somebody, but I was born a nobody, and I want to make it.’ What are the options to make it that are not the traditional routes? For some kids from the underclass, it doesn’t feel like that’s their route, going to university, going through the systems that they felt have failed them before. And so what are the alternatives? It’s social media. You see kids who are getting famous and being seen on social media. And so that was a huge part of the movie — just getting those viewers on Instagram and building an audience that can see you. You have a thousand views and you feel like you’re Beyoncé! … We wanted to take the characters very seriously, just as serious as they took themselves. We wanted it to be really raw. It’s very normal to them. There’s no shame in anything they do.”
The 26th annual Indie Memphis Film Festival runs October 24th through 29th, with films screening at Crosstown Theater, Playhouse on the Square, Circuit Playhouse, and Malco Studio on the Square. The complete schedule, passes, and tickets to individual movies are available at indiememphis.org. For continuing coverage of the festival, go to memphisflyer.com.
Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth are both Thor in Thor: Love and Thunder.
There are two schools of thought on how to make a movie about comic book superheroes. The first is to try and make it realistic and grounded in the real world. That’s what Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy did for Batman and The Joker. Those films are grim and violent, long on visceral thrills, short on humor.
The second school of thought is to make comic book superhero movies more comic book-y. Outlandish plots, self-aware asides, and jaunty humor are the order of the day. The best example of this school of thought is the wacky Batman TV series from 1966. Richard Donner’s earnest 1978 Superman is a less extreme version.
Students of the gritty school accuse the other side of not taking the source material seriously, while the comic book-y school believes that the grittys fundamentally misunderstand the source material. Since films about superpowered people wearing tights punching each other in space are ubiquitous to the point of being mandatory, the question “Is Batman a good-natured altruist like Adam West or a glowering neo-fascist like Robert Pattison?“ has outsized impact on the culture.
The two philosophies collide violently in Thor: Love and Thunder. Chris Hemsworth has now appeared in nine films as Thor, but he didn’t find his footing until 2017’s Thor: Raganork, when director Taika Waititi empowered him to go for laughs. Since then, the himbo from Asgard has been a breath of fresh air when things get a little too self-serious in the MCU.
The gritty side is represented by Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher. As Nolan’s gravelly voiced Batman, he wrenched the gravitas out of a rich boy who dresses like a bat to play cops and robbers. Making the DC hero into a Marvel antagonist is a admittedly stunt casting, but Bale is a phenomenally talented actor who played one of the greatest villains in cinematic history in American Psycho.
Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder.
Gorr is the first person we see in Love and Thunder, wandering through the desert of his home planet on a pilgrimage to the shrine of his god Rapu (Jonny Brugh) in an effort to save his daughter, Love (India Rose Hemsworth, who is actually Chris Hemsworth’s daughter) from the blight that has consumed their world. But Love dies anyway, and when Gorr meets the real Rapu, he makes it clear that he doesn’t care about the sufferings of the little people who worship him. So Gorr grabs the nearest weapon, which happens to be the god-killing Necrosword, and vows to wage a campaign of deicide, beginning with Rapu.
Meanwhile, Thor is hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, saving planets and — having sculpted his Avengers: Endgame dad bod into a chiseled god bod — looking good doing it. Thor’s intro sequence epitomizes why I prefer the comic-booky approach to comic-book movies. I can get detectives chasing serial killers and corrupt cops anywhere, but only Waititi can give me a space Viking fighting an army of owl bears on hover bikes.
Thor gets wind of Gorr’s anti-god crusade, and returns to Earth to check on New Asgard, where the refugees from his destroyed home planet are now running a tourist trap. Sure enough, Gorr and his shadow monsters have come calling. But the Asgardians are putting up a fight, led by Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and The Mighty Thor (Natalie Portman).
Hold up — there’s another Thor? And he’s a she? And she’s Thor’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Jane Foster, who, for budgetary reasons was unceremoniously written out of the story after Thor: The Dark World? Yes, yes, and yes. Since the breakup, Jane’s had her ups and downs, first becoming a famous physicist and then contracting terminal cancer. She heeded a psychic call to New Asgard, where the reassembled pieces of Thor’s broken hammer Mjolnir prolonged her life and granted her the powers of the thunder god. As we’ll see, facing an ex who also has his old job is just the beginning of Thor’s problems.
Love and Thunder is a deeply divided movie. On the one hand, you’ve got a hero dying of cancer and a villain whose motivation is literally the Greek philosopher Epicurius’ Problem of Evil. On the other hand, you’ve got Hemsworth mugging for the camera and the director himself (as Thor’s sidekick Korg) narrating as a “once upon a time” story. Bale tries valiantly to fit in, but he’s got one gear: “intense.” Portman is professional who understands the assignment, and is able to at least fake having fun. Ultimately, the film collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Love and Thunder can’t decide if it wants to laugh at itself or soar into Valhalla, and ends up doing neither well.
As University of Memphis Film Professor Marina Levina likes to say, all horror is rooted in body horror. From the bloody dismemberment of slasher films to vile mutations of David Cronenberg, the entire genre rests on a bedrock of biological revulsion. The principle extends all the way back to the work where sci fi and horror first converged. The star of Frankenstein was a monster stitched together out of discarded body parts. Feminist critics have pointed out that, at the time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she had recently had a miscarriage. The darkest fears of humanity are rooted in the squirmy realities of our reproduction.
Annihilation, the new film from Ex Machina director Alex Garland, begins with a bit of biology. Lena (Natalie Portman) is lecturing her class at Johns Hopkins University over video of dividing cells. All life, she says, has its origins in this simple event, before revealing that the cells on the screen are cancer.
Lena met her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) while they were both in the Army. She got out, but he stayed and became an elite special forces fighter. A year ago, he left for a secret mission and was never seen again. Lena never got any word from the government on what happened to him, and had given him up for dead — until he suddenly shows up at their house with very little memory of what has transpired. But Lena’s emphatic questioning is interrupted when Kane has a seizure. On the way to the hospital, the ambulance is intercepted by government vehicles, and soon Lena wakes up in a mysterious hospital room with no recollection of how she got there.
This won’t be the first time Lena wakes up disoriented in this creepy, slow burn thriller. Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a government psychologist, reveals to her that Kane’s mission was to Area X, a spot on the swampy Gulf Coast that is surrounded by a mysterious shimmer, some kind of visible force field that appears like a giant soap bubble. The shimmer first appeared three years ago, and it has been steadily growing in size. No one who has gone in has ever come out — except Kane, and the authorities are unsure how he got from the Gulf Coast to Baltimore without anyone noticing. As Kane clings to life, Lena is recruited on a desperate mission to get to the lighthouse at the center of Area X. What the team of four women finds will be crucial to preserving the future of life on earth.
Natalie Portman stars in Annihilation, Alex Garland’s new sci-fi/horror film.
Annihilation is adapted from the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, but its concept has deep roots in H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 “The Colour Out of Space,” where a meteorite brings a strange chromatic plague to the swamps of New England, and Roadside Picnic, a 1971 Russian science-fiction novel where teams of dragooned men must brave a zone where the laws of physics break down in order to recover alien artifacts. Garland’s pacing and staging take inspiration from Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaption of Roadside Picnic. Inside Area X, Lena and her crew find both wonders and horror, with rainbow-colored plants and half-human monsters.
Portman is the focus of the picture, and she carries the weight of the production with the same kind of calm professionalism her “warrior scientist” exudes when being presented with mind-bending sights and concepts. Jason Leigh, the secretive leader of the expedition, is uncharacteristically wooden in the first half, but loosens up as the going gets weirder and more paranoid. Isaac’s role is barely there in this female-driven story, but in a series of cleverly constructed flashbacks, his charisma provides relief from the horror slog through the psychedelic swamps.
But the acting, while serviceable, is not really the point. Lena and Kane’s relationship drama feels like a distraction from Garland’s mixture of horror beats and big think concepts. Even as it relies on horror tropes for shape (why do a group of trained scientists and soldiers insist on splitting up like they’re in the Blair Witch Project?) Annihilation‘s mission is to plumb the depths of Lovecraftian existential fear. The universe is a big and scary place that cares nothing about the problems of two little people, or even one little planet.
When Jackie was being filmed in early 2016, few could have predicted how relevant it would be in 2017. The film, starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy and helmed by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, is meant to be a portrait of Mrs. Kennedy at the most trying time of her life, the days after her husband’s assassination and his funeral. But it’s also about the second-most traumatic transition of power in American history, and as the clock runs out on the Obama presidency, Jackie takes on another level of pathos.
The frame for the story is an interview Kennedy did with Theodore White, a famed foreign correspondent whose book, The Making of the President, 1960, cemented the narrative of John F. Kennedy’s insurgent win over Richard Nixon. The week after the asassination, White was summoned to the Kennedy’s Hyannis Port compound for an emotional interview with the suddenly widowed first lady. Over vodka and cigarettes — so many cigarettes — Kennedy poured her heart out to White. His story, which appeared in Life magazine, was the origin of the Camelot mythos that sprang up around the Kennedy presidency.
Jackie jumps around in time as the first lady’s recollections roll from one moment to the next. Director Larraín’s assignment is to recreate historical moments already familiar to many viewers, while presenting them in a fresh way for younger people unfamiliar with history. The recreation of the 1962 television tour of the White House, in which Portman is digitally inserted into some existing shots while others are recreated out of whole cloth, is an incredible example of using video texture to set mood. The phantom ride as the motorcade bearing the wounded president races to Parkland Hospital and the foggy sequence in which Jackie tours Arlington cemetery, looking for a place to stake out for John’s grave, feature some particularly inspired work by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine.
Probably due to the presence of Darren Aronofsky as producer, Jackie is as tight a production as you’ll see these days. But it’s all in service to Portman’s layered performance as a woman buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. As first lady, Mrs. Kennedy saw it as her job to project an image of perfection for the women of America. As a child of Manhattan wealth and a Vassar girl, Jackie was well suited for the role. As Portman reveals, when her world crumbled around her, that quest for perfection turned into yet another unbearable burden. And yet, somehow, Jackie perservered. One of Portman’s best touches is the little bit of surprise that leaks through her mask of grief and rage each time she makes a tough decision, as if Jackie herself doesn’t know the source of her inner strength.
Ably supporting Portman is a nearly unrecognizable Greta Gerwig as Kennedy’s secretary Nancy Tuckerman. Peter Sarsgaard doesn’t look very much like Bobby Kennedy, but his onscreen presence is always welcome. Caspar Phillipson, on the other hand, makes a scarily accurate John F. Kennedy.
The most poignant moments in the film are reverse tracking shots of a shell-shocked Jackie gliding like a living ghost through the empty White House residence. Through Portman’s eyes, we gaze at the sudden end of an era of class, elegance, and hope, and the prospect of an uncertain, but inevitably darker future. This is the moment we find ourselves in now, only instead of an assassin’s bullet, it was a flurry of espionage and skullduggery that have dealt a disorienting blow to our national psyche. Portman’s wounded, flinty Jackie, dispensing orders with an eerie calm in public while frantically pounding down valium and vodka in private, resonates deeply in 2017. Let’s hope we can all match the cold steel in her voice when Jackie refuses to take off her blood-stained Chanel suit — “Let them see what they have done.”
