Me and You and Everyone We Know

Miranda July has a new book out—I've been hearing a lot of interviews she's giving about it—and I remember seeing her directing debut and thinking it was kinda "meh"...however talented she is as a creative force.

Anyway, here's what I wrote at the time of the film's release...

Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005)

Oddball movie about oddballs and the love-fantasy they all pursue, from childhood to old age. Lots of good moments, but the cartilage holding the thing together is a little thread-bare, although the good parts are good enough to make you forget what you're seeing isn't very good...like good performance art should. Ultimately, it's a movie that depends on the charity of the audience to give it the glow in memory that the actuality lacks.

Richard (John Hawkes) is a shoe salesman, recently separated, sharing custody of his two kids, who are growing up a little too fast. Christine (Miranda July) is a multi-hyphenate: performance artist/writer-film-maker/fantasist/assisted living chauffeur. She's trying to get a local art showcase to show her work while also juggling mooning over Richard and driving her "Eldercab." Everything revolves around these two characters in a goldfish bowl environment so tightly wound it would make Iñárritu slap his forehead in disbelief—everyone knows everyone else, even if they don't know it. And so much of the movie depends on code and secret messages that one suspects July is trying to create her own club-house with secret decoder rings.*

I'll avoid talking about the creepy aspects of the film, which involve underage kids and one pervy guy who talks (or writes and tapes to his window...without consequences, mind you) about what he'd like to do to two young women who hang out at the bus-stop in front of his house (which parallels an earlier incident in a chat-room), and when confronted with it, collapses beautifully in a puff of his own imagined machismo. One becomes used to the 90° turn that July uses to cap her various stories and soon they no longer surprise. You also can't imagine the stories going anywhere further than what she presents...everything just ends, another aspect of the limited life-in-a-nutshell world that she creates. It kept reminding me that these are "characters" and not people. Conceits, not lives.

Roger Ebert inexplicably called this the fifth best film of the decade.** As they say in Adaptation.: "You are what you love, not what loves you." Me and You and Everyone We Know didn't give me much love. And Ebert must have had a good week that week.

 

* "Macaroni" and ))<>((: would that the messages actually be profound.

 

** Well, technically, not inexplicably, but what he found charming, I found a bit...annoying.  Different strokes.

Higher Ground

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Blessed Assurance"

or

"Jesus Is __________"

The first thing I ever saw Vera Farmiga in was The Departed in "the girlfriend" role, and I was none too impressed. Then, came Up in the Air and her wistful performance as a "fellow traveler" who hooks up with George Clooney—two "stop-overs" that pass in the night—and it was an amazing performance.

Now, with her first film as director, Higher Ground, she stakes out indie territory as something of a maverick. It's a film about religion without hysterics, without condescension, without judgement, without prejudice...which is a far cry from the scripture Hollywood habitually reads from.

Higher Ground tells the story of Corinne (Farmiga, and played at younger ages by her sister Taissa and McKenzie Turner), daughter of divorced parents (Donna Murphy and John Hawkes), who answers the call of her minister (Bill Irwin) to accept Jesus into her life ("He's knocking at your door...") but finds herself standing at the threshold, believing but not wholly accepting, finding herself, as a woman, relegated to a role "submitting" to her husband and the male hierarchy of her church, seeing her best friend, the earthy Annika (Dagmara Dominczyk) finding her own personal way in Life and Faith and coveting it (When Annika effortlessly speaks in tongues—an act frowned upon by her church—Corinne blurts out "I want that!" but never manages it-in fact, one of the best scenes is Corinne, alone in the bathroom, exorting Jesus to speak through her, and finally schlumping out in frustration).

What makes her study of a woman struggling with Faith (with a capital "F") within a strict Christian community (albeit of somewhat counter-cultural "flower"-children) different is that it never wavers from the precept that religion is good.  People are flawed, yes, as her believers are, but faith is a nurturing, fulfilling way of Life that sustains and helps throughout our trials. This is a far cry from the way faith is usually portrayed these days, where the Believer is at least a hypocrite and at worst, some kind of predator. One could argue the point, but Higher Ground revealed to me some of the conditioning such repetition has achieved over the years in me, an agnostic. Here, one expectantly waits for any hint of a gouge in the old wooden cross, where any of the characters is guilty of anything, but sanctimony—the most intense that fear occurs is at a talk with an in-faith marriage counselor who insists on seeing Corrine alone without her husband (Joshua Leonard), which makes one wonder if he's going to fulfill the role of "the creepy one," but, no, all he wants to do is good, offering sage advice more for her faith than for her marriage.

Not that there aren't others who fulfill those roles, and, Lord have mercy, if it isn't the non-believers who turn out to be the hypocrites and suspicious ones (exemplified by a welcoming neighbor who stops by to warn Corinne and her visiting Mother of "religious nuts" who might live nearby, while the woman of faith keeps her counsel, instead stuffing her face on a gift of offered doughnuts that might have a bit of a bitter quality to them), and the Irish mailman on her block who takes such an interest doesn't turn out to be all that's delivered. The points are not written with judgmental heaviness or pulpit-pounding, but are merely observations of a perpetual outsider looking in.

As someone who has struggled with religion all his adult life, I found refreshing the simple expression that faith can lend grace to one's life, without hammering the point home as many of the "message" movies have a tendency to do. And that the film chooses to portray Corinne's struggle as difficult, even heart-rending, and faith being anything but easy, only makes the faith of those not embroiled in such a battle seem stronger by comparison. I admire that so much. If there are any complaints to be made, it is that sometimes the film veers into Corinne-fantasy mode for easy laughs, or too-easy satire. The film doesn't require or it or need it, and director Farmiga should have had more faith in the simple power of her film to stay clear of it.

Can't wait to see what she does next.

2022 Update: Still waiting....

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A forgotten film, but I've never forgotten it, and I doubt anyone who's seen it has forgotten it. Long before her "Scarlet Witch" days, it marked the "break out" role of Elizabeth Olsen.

 

Written at the time of the film's release.

Cult Film
or
"Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose"

Martha Marcy May Marlene has gotten a lot of press, mostly for the starring performance of the non-twin Olsen sister, Elizabeth (she really is quite good in it, her film debut), but the film has a lot to show besides being fodder for the tabloids. A slowly unfolding paranoid thriller, the first feature of writer-director Sean Durkin, you wonder exactly where it's going and where it's leading—if anywhere.

It keeps you guessing—the very same predicament of almost every character in the film. The film opens on an idyllic farm community...commune, more appropriately...in the Catskills, as the members busy themselves, mending fences, tending crops, while the children meander. Bucolic, it looks. Slightly rustic and hippieish, it feels. Then, at dinner-time, the women wait in the kitchen while the men eat...first...and they only eat when they've had their fill. Slightly odd, slightly misogynistic, but one gets the impression that it's a male-centered, maybe religious community, just the slightest sense of unease.

It's how Durkin operates. No one comes right out and says anything. Characters don't come out and say "This is this and that is that." We, the audience are allowed to observe and ponder—to notice when things turn slightly askew and, in the time-compressed world of the movies that happens fairly quickly, but at a slower pace than most mainstream movies. Like the happenstances of those of the film, things go along normally until it suddenly dawns on us—something's wrong here.

Early on, Marcy May (Elizabeth Olsen) awakens at night, and softly skulks out of the main house, where the women all sleep in one room. She goes out the front door, and we notice one of the women is awake and watching her from inside.  Marcy walks across the lawn to the street separating their farm from the woods...and then, she breaks into a run, mad, desperate and hides amidst the collapsed trunks of dead trees while the house empties of men and women who run through the woods, looking for her. It's as creepy as a zombie movie.

Eventually, she makes it to a telephone, where, crying, desperate, she calls a woman who is amazed to at the call. She hasn't heard from her for two years.  "Tell me where you are and I'll come get you right now." And soon, an SUV pulls up. A woman gets out. And Marcy May...or Martha, as the woman calls her...collapses in her arms.

It's Martha's sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson) who's found her, and who asks questions, but gets no answers. Where's Martha been? Where'd she go? Is she alright? What happened? Why didn't she try to contact her before? Martha hems and haws and says something about a cheating boyfriend, but never goes into detail. And nothing is pressed. Martha sleeps. Lucy and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) pad softly around their posh lake-house, trying to make Martha at home, but also wondering why she's acting so diffidently, cluelessly, not revealing much.

It causes a strain in Lucy and Ted's domestic bliss—they want to have a family, but a well-ordered one (good luck with that, kids!) and Martha is a square peg in their round lifestyle. What's got into her, anyway? She skinny-dips in the lake (ferchrist'ssake!) with all the neighbors around (and I'm sure there's a covenant against that!), wears the same worn jean shorts and shirt from her escape day after day, cleans incessantly, doesn't try to find a job, and seems to be constantly wrestling with the "fight-or-flight" instinct.

They don't know about the flash-backs. Durkin builds the story of Marcy May's life, while at the same time showing the breakdown of her time with her sister.  Early on, we're given the sense that there's some push me-pull you occurring: the farm has an odd, creepy malevolence to it—there's a sense of freedom there, of good leftist values, all macrobiotic and natural with shared living spaces, shared clothes and a general lack of possessiveness. It contrasts sharply with Lucy and Ted's tight-ass lifestyle, neat as a pin and dead as a door-nail. You start to compare and contrast—where would Martha (or Marcy May) be better off? Where is freedom, that is "real" freedom, to be oneself, in either world that Martha (or Marcy May) has inhabited? That's the first 30 minutes or so of the film.

 

And then, things turn ugly.

And very interesting, much to the presence of newly ubiquitous utility-character-actor John Hawkes (who has developed a habit of subtly inhabiting roles of such wide range with such economy that I'm starting to think he's in a class by himself in the acting field). As Patrick, the pater-too-familias of the commune, he projects a creepy sense of calm manipulation that as the movie goes further turns dark and menacing. It's not in the manner, but in the words, which Hawkes sells in the same calm talk, that in the worst of times turns into icy silences. Hawkes is just plain Good, whether he's playing good or bad.

I recommend this one. It's subtle, tense and troubling with no easy answers and the momentum of water circling in a drain to an inevitable conclusion (which we never see) that we know is coming. It's occasionally raw and as comforting as sandpaper. It's not for the complacent movie-goer, but it's a damn interesting film (not only in the skewering of thriller cliches but also in the subtle points its trying to make) and an even more impressive debut, not only for Ms. Olsen, but also for its writer-director.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Mutiny and Rage
or
"You're So Pretty. But She's Still Dead."

A line from Seven Psychopaths might be a good preamble for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."

A timely film about the dangers of acting without filters, Martin McDonagh's new film (after In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths) shows what can happen when the thirst for revenge overruns your life: it escalates, creates consequences, and expands in ever-increasing ripples of cause and effect. You want revenge? Don't stop at digging two graves.

Three Billboards defies pigeon-holing and genre-fication. It's too commonplace to be a thriller. It's too intense to be a drama. It's too dark to be a comedy. But it's all of those things at one time (the comedy being more of the Black-Irish variety). It is too sunny and rural to be a noir, but it does share one quality with that type of film: there is no merciful God in evidence in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Driving on the seldom-used road by her house, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) sees three billboards in disrepair that haven't been used in decades. She stops, backs up and takes in all three of them and the impact they'd have driving past them—1...2...3. And something sparks her. She takes five thousand in cash and strides into the local marketing agency and announces she wants to rent those billboards. After going what can't be on the signs ("Well, I think I'll be alright then" she says), she signs the contract and soon, the billboards are up, and their message is provocative.

The first person to see them is Deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a not-too-competent law officer, who drives by one night and is shocked, angered and his first reaction is to call the Ebbing chief of police Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) as the billboards are a direct challenge to him. The chief is trying to have dinner with his family and Dixon's a hot-head that, for some reason, Willoughby keeps on the force, but his a cooler head and not nearly as reactionary. He'll wait and talk to Mildred in the morning.

News of the billboards has now spread throughout Ebbing and the subject is divisive. The chief has a lot of friends and Mildred has made a few enemies because of them. But a visit from the Chief to try and mollify the situation does help things any much. The Chief wants the billboards down, but he understands the situation; it's been seven months since Mildred's daughter Angela (Kathryn Newton) was raped and murdered, her body burned in the very area of the billboards, and, as they accuse, no arrests have been made in the case. Angela is dead and buried, but Mildred and her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges) have been living with the consequences and their own consciences ever since. Mildred's abusive husband (John Hawkes) has moved out and taken up with a 19 year old intern at the zoo (Samara Weaving).

The Chief is empathetic to Mildred—he has been trying to solve the case and it has been frustrating that there is no forensic evidence to follow up on and tells her that, eventually—in these cases—someone will say something out of turn, someone will slip up, some code of silence will be broken and then, they can act. And as aggrieved as he is about events, he still thinks the billboards are unnecessary. "I don't think those billboards are very fair," he says. Mildred has none of it. "The time it took you to get out here whining like a bitch, Willoughby, some other poor girl's probably out there being butchered." Even telling her that he has cancer doesn't soften her resolve or her frustration. The billboards will stay, come what will.

Dixon is pissed. He wants something done. But, he's under a bureaucratic cloud for beating up an African-American while in custody. He's the loudest and crudest of the local constabulary and has very little anger-management skills—something he probably learned from his mother (Sandy Martin), with whom he still lives. Willoughby can barely contain him during a visit to the ad office—across from the police station—to pressure them to take the signs down, but don't press the point when they realize that they really have no justification within the law to do it. Willoughby, however, starts to re-examine the evidence and crime scene to see if there is something—anything—he might have missed in the initial investigation. 

Confrontations with Dixon (at a bar where he regularly drinks himself into a stupor) and some of the locals causes Mildred to be arrested, but she remains committed to keeping the signs up and the pressure on. Neither side is going to budge, and it's only Willoughby's keeping things from escalating that keeps the town from exploding or Dixon from doing something stupid...or more stupid than is typical for him.

It is that constant, simmering feel of menace that makes Three Billboards a thriller. It is the unblinking directness of everybody's words and actions (and their inability to hedge anything) that makes it funny. It is the utter helplessness and casual brutality that makes it a noir. You begin to wonder if anybody has a shred of decency in the whole thing, but they're inhabiting an indecent uncaring world and the posturing, the implied threats, the "scorched Earth" unequivocation, and the tit-for-tat intensification of hostilities has to come to a head. Before the movie's over, things will flare up to a combustible heat, leaving behind devastation in its wake, if not entirely due to the actions/reactions taken, even if, in the circle outside the fire, it's perceived to be.

Three Billboards is a great movie and, dare I say it, a sign of our times. It is tough—it is not for the blue-hairs and the easily offended (because there is something to offend just about everybody). It has the huevos to to put a lie to the phrase "profound rage." There is nothing "profound" about it (perhaps another word should be found to be paired with it, lest there be any confusion), certainly not in this context. A terrible wrong committed by arrogance has occurred, in the quest for vengeance it gets compounded, and then compounded and then compounded again. We as a people (urged on by simplistic morality plays, such as can be found at the movies) are spoon-fed viscerally satisfying revenge-scenarios that make us think such a thing is commonplace and normal in a philosophy that is based on "an eye for an eye." If we could stop with just an eye, maybe it could work, but the instinct is escalate and with no end in our cyclopean sight.

The performances in this things are brilliant. McDormand is totally unafraid to make her Mildred ugly, both in spirit and face. Keeping her chin up has solidified it to granite, and cocked it forward with a invitation to, go ahead, take a swipe at it...at your peril. A monologue planting flowers near the billboards where her daughter was murdered reveals a person so consumed by grief and guilt and anger that nothing in this world, no miracle, could pull her out of her single-minded need to see somebody pay...and it can be anyone, so far as she's concerned. Thought has left the building. The un-nuanced need for revenge has replaced it. Interestingly, an inspiration for her performance came from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Every morning, McDormand sat in her make-up chair staring at pictures of John Wayne, while Rockwell's mirror was covered by pictures of Lee Marvin...and Barney Fife (from "The Andy Griffith Show"). Apt.

I've listened to some hand-wringing on public radio about the movie being insensitive to some issues—like spousal abuse and race-baiting—and being caustic in its humor, which is mostly ironic in nature (folks don't know what they're saying is innately absurd) and that "there is no one to root for." Well, no shit, Sherlock. This isn't a super-hero movie (which, by the way, are based on the notion of crowd-pleasing revenge at any costs). This is about people so burning with anger and self-righteousness that they believe they can do anything, within or without the borders of lawfulness or decency, in the pursuit of their personal cause, effects be damned. We're seeing a lot of that in the world today—letting the world burn because the "cause" is right, without the foresight to see what might be the consequence. If anything, the movie is closer to the "Incredible Mess" version of comedy, where people just dig themselves a deeper hole for themselves without the perspective to see that things are getting more dire the harder they pursue it. In that realm, there is very little to distinguish between comedy and tragedy.

Even it's ending is maddeningly ambiguous, as the most unlikely of partners go off in pursuit of the most tenuous of missions, leaving the audience with (if they're of the mind) only the most thread-bare of hope that someone will come to their senses. But, it's a bit like hoping you can convince someone to consider that they might be wrong. It doesn't work for ideologues, Trump-voters, Nazi's, the PC-GI's...Hell, it doesn't even work for film-critics. Ahab must be led to the whirlpool, and fools hoisted on their own petard. Because doubt is perceived to be weakness in a patriarchy, as opposed to being thought of as open-mindedness and thoughtfulness.

So it goes. Until we can find something better.