What We Watched in January
My favorite thing in this world is movies and my second favorite thing is discussing them. One of my goals for this little space is to share and analyze some of the movies we watch each month. For now, these thoughts will be in small snippets, but I hope to move into bigger reviews in the future. Baby steps. Here is what we watched in January.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s striking directorial debut explores the unspoken and most honest thoughts on motherhood against the sunny Italian seaside. Darkness lurks behind every corner as we watch Leda, played by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, actually execute the fantasies some mothers (myself included) only dream of - having an affair and running away from your endless responsibilities to start a dazzling new life where you’re taken seriously for your intellect and passion. But seeing these fantasies in action only makes you want to pull your baby in closer and tell your husband you’re sorry for yelling about the dishes. (Sorry, Art!)
Gyllenhaal’s effort and care of the source material don’t go unnoticed, and the performances from all the female leads are dynamic, but there were too many unanswered questions for me to fully love the film as much as I wanted to. Despite my issues, I wholeheartedly support Jessie Buckley’s Oscar nomination and casting Paul Mescal in more projects. Hunter Harris wrote a hilarious essay on Dakota Johnson’s hair color in the movie for her Substack that I feel should be required reading after watching.
Willem Defoe! Susan Sarandon! In a Paul Schrader film! A film with such promise that unfortunately…fell short for me. Willem Dafoe, of course, delivers a superb performance as a drug dealer questioning his past, present, and future relationships and the path each of these timelines lay before him; and I absolutely loved the imagery of New York garbage piling up on the sidewalk as his character’s questioning becomes darker and more ambiguous. Despite the imagery and the subject matter explored, I think Schrader could have pushed things further and delivered a more solid ending that some of his other films are able to achieve (First Reformed immediately comes to mind). Light Sleeper also has one of the oddest sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie and I just can’t excuse it!
We watched The Crucible as a bit of fun for our upcoming trip to Salem and were left depressed by how relevant the play/film’s message still is. Whether it’s 1692, 1953, or 2021, fascism, misogny, and the weaponization of white women’s tears still pervade our world. The “sheer depth of time” the play encompasses can’t be dismissed and Arthur Miller explores this far better than I ever could in his 1996 New Yorker article about why he wrote the play. I still can’t decide if Winona Ryder’s performance was over the top or not, but Dan “Yell” Day-Lewis is compelling as ever as John Proctor.
I watched And Just Like That…while I was recovering from my booster and I think a low-stakes, lazy viewing was the perfect way to take the new series in. AJLT isn’t altogether bad - it has its moments (Miranda yelling “What am I? Meg Ryan? Fuck!” was a laugh out loud moment for me) - but it’s trying so hard to come across as socially conscious that it ends up feeling superficial and flat. It’s a small step up to see the women have conversations around race and attend protests, but it would ultimately be more radical to have the characters actually exist as fleshed-out people in their world. Not as a caricature to appease our new social landscape but as someone who has grown alongside them. There are moments where it gets close with Nya and Seema’s family stories but it’s too focused on doing and saying the “right” that it ends up losing the sparkle we loved about the original series.
I picked up Vanilla Sky from a Blockbuster sales bin on a Friday night in high school and subsequently went on to watch it for many, many a Friday night throughout my teenage years. I loved Vanilla Sky so much I distinctly remember putting Penelope Cruz’s line “I’ll see you in another life when we are both cats” in my LiveJournal profile to show I was deep, ok? Vanilla Sky has the right mix of edginess, mystery, and romance that hits just right when you’re 15 years old and was on constant rotation in my tiny VHS/DVD TV until I eventually went to college and attempted to live an edgy life myself (the jury is still out on that one). Vanilla Sky didn’t even cross my mind until 19 years later while I was doing my nails at home on another Friday night. I wanted something easy and familiar to have on in the background and as I got deeper into the movie, and subsequently stopped doing my nails, I realized, wait, did I even remotely understand what this movie is about?
Vanilla Sky is able to capture loneliness in a way I hadn’t yet understood at the age of 15. It explores familial and romantic relationships in an eerily predicted future where media dominance and holograms run free. The fluid, dreamlike structure of the movie only muddles these explorations and makes you wonder how real any of this is. How real are the relationships that mean so much to us? Though by no means the first film to implement this technique, it’s interesting to see how it was used in the early 2000s and how shows like Euphoria are using an unreliable narrator.
As the movie went on I couldn’t help but think that David was a relatable role for Tom Cruise to play - he’s a lonely man hiding under the mask of a charming man who can’t meet the expectations placed on him. I went on to read quite a few reviews that called the film “a vanity and narcissistic project” and it made complete sense to me. Of course, it’s a vanity project - he’s playing himself. The mask he wears in the film is similar to the one that we’ve come to accept now but was still shrouded in mystery during the film’s release in 2001 (subsequently the same year he and Nicole Kidman divorced). These layers and the complexity that go into his performance make it stronger than those in Magnolia or even Jerry Maguire, in my opinion.
Credit for this performance is given completely to Cameron Crowe. Crowe is clearly able to bring out a special softness in Tom Cruise that I don’t feel other directors are able to achieve. Crowe’s uncanny ability to mesh feeling with iconography and music (shout out to Nancy Wilson who scored both the Vanilla Sky and Almost Famous soundtracks) gives his characters a depth that sticks with you. It would have been interesting to see Crowe’s ability continue to take on even edgier, even more sci-fi, films that pushed boundaries, instead of going down the road he went down, but c’est la vie. Maybe he’ll make one in the next life when we’re all cats.