Sunday, 2/2
The end of an excellent festival, with a couple of truly magnificent films (Train Dreams and Sorry, Baby), a whole lot of really good ones, and only one real dud. Time well spent, and so much for people to look forward to in the year ahead.
Omaha
This was a tough one.
John Magaro's Martin packs his kids and their dog into the car, moving quickly and taking only the most essential items. We soon learn they're being evicted from their home and Martin is taking the kids from Nevada to Nebraska. We wonder what must be there— family? A job? Martin's hometown? Their mother is not around and we get the idea she may have died (she did). Their car barely works and Martin and nine-year-old Ella have to push the car in neutral and then hop in and try the ignition whenever they need to get it going. Things are hard.
Cole Webley's drama takes place entirely with Martin and his kids, much of it from inside their car as they travel, as Martin spends what little money he seems to have left on a few meals and one big trip to the Omaha zoo, and as we wonder what might have gotten them to this point and where it might end up. Martin is obviously deeply distressed, but this is probably not surprising given the situation. His kids seem like really good kids. But gosh it's difficult to watch, to watch these kids have to come to terms with having an imperfect father, to watch this father struggle in front of his kids. And to see how Ella blames herself for some of the tough things that happen, even though she has played no part in it at all.
And where it all does go is, frankly, horrifying, though not in a violent way— it's emotionally and psychologically devastating, and we wonder what could have gotten Martin to this point, to the point where you imagine he didn't really intend to live with what he does, although there's no indication he was going to end his life, or anyone else's. And then text on screen at the end of the film puts it all in extraordinarily sad context.
But because of Magaro's performance, and because of what Webley does with everything before that ending, we see all of this with at least some understanding of a person who might do what Martin does— if all we'd had was the end result, we can easily think, "who would do such a thing?" but here, we have an answer to that question, or at least the idea of an answer. To put a face, feelings, humanity, and pain to a thing that's so hard to imagine is to create some kind of empathy, and to understand just how difficult the world must seem to someone who does this thing. Would you or I ever do this? Probably not. I hope not. No, never. But people do. Real people.
DJ Ahmet
I've now seen three movies from or set in (North) Macedonia (this, You Won't Be Alone, and Honeyland), and all three have been fantastic, so, I dunno, North Macedonia, what else ya got for me?
This is a crowd charmer, for sure, about a teenage boy in a small village whose father takes him out of school to help tend the sheep and sell tobacco at the market, whose mother has died, and whose little brother doesn't (can't? won't?) speak. The teenager, Ahmet, is a little odd, but not in any sort of weird way, just in a way that makes other people think he's a little odd, and he likes music. And that's pretty much where we start when he meets the daughter of a village neighbor. The young woman, Aya, has returned from Germany to be married to a man she's never met, but she has some cosmopolitan views of the world and she's pretty clearly not the kind of person who's just going to marry some stranger because of tradition. Her father disagrees, but she has a plan.
That plan ends up involving Ahmet, who Aya takes a bit of a liking to, partly so our plot can go ahead, but also because he's a little bit different, which is nice for someone who's seen a little more of the world than most of the people in the village have. Aya intends to perform with some friends in an upcoming music festival, and her plan is to dance so provocatively (which, to our American eyes, is barely even enough qualify as "tame," it's something tamer than tame) that her father, or her fiancé's father, will be forced to call off the wedding. So Ahmet becomes her DJ, since he's the one who finds access to music and some speakers (these things aren't so easy to come by around there), and they all practice in secret.
In broad strokes, much of the film is what we've seen in other movies about strict tradition vs. changing societal views, about differences between generations, about young people who are prevented from doing the things they want to do because they aren't "proper," according to their elders. But it's all shown as such a small, human level that no part of it ever feels like a caricature (even the hodja who runs the call to prayer over a loudspeaker across the town and often has technical problems feels just quirky enough to be real and not so silly as to be a cartoon) and we don't feel like we're just watching a cliché, even if the basic structure is so familiar.
And it sure is nice to look at. The landscape is gorgeous, the clothes the young women wear is lively, colorful, and vibrant, and that pink sheep sure does pop on the screen. I don't know if DJ Ahmet will change the world, but it's a lovely look at another part of the world that we don't often get a chance to see,
Didn't Die
Making any zombie movie these zombie-saturated days is questionable, and making one that never really does much more than be another zombie movie is even less well advised. I give this film credit for trying, at least a little bit, to be something more than that, but it doesn't get there, largely because it struggles to really take seriously the serious parts of what it's showing, even if it thinks it's doing just that.
We're in a world where some kind of zombie apocalypse has happened, with these zombies being a (new?) kind that don't move during the daytime (except maybe they do now!) and are largely pretty easy to avoid if you're paying attention. Our main character Vinita, hosts a podcast about what life post-apocalypse is like (which, yeah, that tracks), and she and her brother have spent quite a lot of time on the road gathering stories and producing their show. They're home now, where her other brother and his wife live in their childhood home, and maybe there's some family trauma to unpack (their parents are dead, is what it is, and it was zombie-related).
The film occasionally puts text up on the screen with quotes about loss and grief, and there are extended scenes, especially later in the film, where characters describe their own struggles in dealing with all the trauma, and at least the movie is trying to do something with all this. But none of the "serious" parts are helped at all by all of the too-ironic humor surrounding it, or the movie's inability to acknowledge this pain and grief on anything other than a surface level. Yes, they're exploring it, but more in the way you browse the tourist shop than in a really deep examination of the pain surrounding them. And when just last year Sundance had a much better movie about grief and loss during a zombie outbreak (Handling the Undead), you know this can be done well.
The movie is made to appear very lo-fi, with shaky black-and-white photography, and this might have helped with the atmosphere, but with the attempts at cheekiness and irony throughout, it tends more just to feel affected. It's all a disappointment, because it's not that there weren't ideas here. It's just that they're never really given the chance to take off.
Saturday, 2/1
Sally
I was a kid in the 1980s, so of course I was incredibly aware of who Sally Ride was, although I specifically remember being confused that "the first (American) woman in space" was a thing that had literally just happened. But certainly I don't think this documentary oversells the magnitude of her profile at the time, she was as big as they say she is.
Cristina Constantini's film takes us through most of Ride's life, focusing most strongly (and understandably) on the period from the late 1970s through the mid-80s when the woman became an astronaut and eventually went to space. It's told more or less conventionally, with a whole lot of archival footage and audio, plenty of talking head interviews with people who worked with, knew, and loved Sally Ride, and some reenactments that are probably unnecessary (and occasionally border on a little bit silly, despite their good intentions). We see how extremely driven Ride was, how competitive she could be with her colleagues (especially the other women who might have instead been the first to go to space), and also how she had to make herself appear far more modest than she actually was in order not to "scare" the public with such strength coming from (gasp) a woman. In fact, we see how she and the other women astronauts essentially had to erase their femininity to function in such a male-dominated environment— or, probably more accurately, to save the fragile egos of the men around them. You'll wonder to yourself if any man at the time had ever actually met a woman, given how astonishingly ignorant the men seem to be of anything woman-related (when Ride is headed to space, NASA considers sending about 100 tampons with her for a week-long trip, she's continually asked if she cries when something goes wrong, and so on). It seems to be the story of the world, as we see how women in the early days of the space program outperformed men on the tasks necessary to become astronauts and yet were still not considered capable, or even really considered at all.
The film moves briskly, but it's not all business— while we see a lot of Ride in her professional capacity, we also hear directly from the woman who was Ride's romantic partner for 27 years, and about how difficult it was for Ride to acknowledge that relationship in any public way (she never did). It's as heartbreaking as you might think, that two people who loved each other couldn't (or, Ride thought they couldn't) let the world know about it, but of course we know their story is hardly unique in that regard. Not that that makes it any easier.
Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)
Undoubtedly the slightest movie I've seen at the festival, but also maybe the most gently pleasant, this is an anthology of stories (as the title says) based around Green Lake in Michigan. And while an anthology can be difficult since there will necessarily be varying quality (even if all of the stories are excellent, some will be more excellent than others), this is also a great example of what can be done with a short film, and what I often like most in short films. Which is to say, for the most part none of these stories try to force a narrative arc into a short period of time, we simply drop in on some lives as they're being lived, and we get a good idea of the people involved, and then we move on.
This is done best in the opening story, about a teenage girl whose mother is kind of a mess, and she goes to stay with her grandparents in a house on the lake. She calls her mother repeatedly on the phone and gets no answer, she learns how to sail her grandfather's sunfish boat, she finds a baby loon whose mother also seems inattentive. But it's the small details that make this what it is— we know the girl is troubled not just because of what we see with her mother, but because if we're paying attention, we see the cut scars on her arm. Her grandparents, while not played by the most polished actors in the world, are pretty dang charming, with her grandmother calling baby loons "loonlets" ("no one calls them that!" the grandfather insists) and the two obviously caring a great deal about their granddaughter. And we see the girl simply sail around the lake, and we imagine what she's thinking and what she's feeling.
The weakest of the stories is the one that tries to do too much, getting into a bit of a caper as a woman meets a man who's dying and who wants to catch a giant fish in the lake, prompting them to steal a harpoon and to get chased by the police. But even this has lovely small details that mostly let us enjoy what we're seeing, even if we wish it were up to the level of the other stories in the film, and certainly up to the level of that first one. Still, take any one of these stories and show it to me on its own, and I would say yes, this is just what I want from a short film.
Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
It's going to be impossible not to be both frustrated and charmed by Rico, the young man at the center of Joel Alfonso Vargas's exceptional film, although not necessarily in equal measure, and certainly not always at the same time. The movie opens with text that reads, "The working man is a sucker," (from A Bronx Tale? Is that where it originates? This is, itself, a Bronx tale, so that seems reasonable enough) but it doesn't appear Vargas really believes that, as it's clear Rico needs to put in the work to make it through what he's about to experience, and he's not always great at doing that.
He's 19 when the movie begins, he spends his time selling an alcoholic concoction he's created on the beach, and he fights with his sister, goes to parties, and generally does what a 19-year-old might do, or at least one who's coming from the environment Rico does. But then everything changes when he gets a 16-year-old girl, Destiny, pregnant, and she comes to live in his bedroom after her mother tosses her out. Everything changes for Rico, and for us, too— there's an immediate emotional switch when Destiny arrives, our empathy for her is swift and deep as we see her quiet and probably terrified, sitting in Rico's room, sitting at the dinner table with Rico's mom and sister, telling Rico she misses her family as he responds, "I'm your family now," and we know how trapped she must feel.
Rico, though, for his part, means it— he does seem to be wanting to do the right thing, he cares about Destiny and their baby, and he wants to get things right. He often doesn't, he drinks too much too often, he gets in fights with Destiny, his mom, his sister (one where he's arguing with all three of them as he insists he won't let their child be vaccinated is especially explosive), he's a little bit irresponsible when it comes to any job he might have. But he's also 19 (or 20, later in the film), he hasn't had a father, and things aren't terribly easy for a kid in this life.
And I've talked entirely about Rico, who is the focus of the film, but we spend a lot of time with Destiny, too (although always with Rico) and we get an idea of who she is, her perspective on all of this, and her interactions with Rico. Vargas's filmmaking is intentionally loose and a little bit rough, often the scenes feel improvised and one scene will cut to the next just before it's actually ended (occasionally in the middle of a word), making us feel like we're dropping in on these people's lives as they live them. And this helps us feel like Rico and Destiny are real people: they have flaws like anyone else, but generally they're pretty supportive of each other. They're just so young, and they act like it. Vargas's film does what good films should do— it helps us to see people as they are, and to get a little bit closer to understanding the humanity in everyone.
Friday, 1/31
Sorry, Baby
If Train Dreams isn't the best movie of the festival, Sorry, Baby is. Eva Victor's film is kind, cheeky, painful, and so, so generous to the experience of its main character, Agnes (played by Victor, who also wrote the film), and to the massively complicated feelings that experience produces.
We meet her a few years after something "bad" has happened, when she's a young professor at the college she graduated from. Talk of a former male advisor gives us an idea of what the bad thing that happened to Agnes might have been, and eventually we're proven correct in our assumption, as we jump around in time (The Year with the Baby, The Year the Bad Thing Happened, The Year with the Really Good Sandwich, etc.) learning about what happened and how it affected the woman in the few years after.
And the "bad thing" is, abhorrently, nothing new— many, many women have this story, and we see the callous way some people treat Agnes, and we shake our heads not because we're surprised, but because we're not surprised at all. But we also see just how complex Agnes's feelings are about what happened— she's sad and hurt and confused and angry, yes, but she also doesn't seem to want retribution (as she says at one point, she doesn't want the man to go to jail because she knows he has a kid, she just wants him to stop being the kind of person who does what he did).
But even as difficult as this all is for Agnes, we also see that she doesn't live in a cynical, wholly traumatic world. Her best friend, Lydie, is exceptionally supportive, her neighbor, Gavin (Lucas Hedges, always delightful), is goofy but caring, and even one magnificent scene involving a man she meets when she pulls off to the side of the road while hyperventilating extends grace and humanity where we might not expect it (it helps that the man is played by John Carroll Lynch, who was made for this kind of role). All of which is to say this isn't an entirely cruel place we live, there is goodness peeking through if we'll see it.
Victor observes Agnes's behavior in the aftermath of the bad thing with wide open eyes and with an understanding of the strangeness of people, their reactions to things, and the situations we can find ourselves in. We can see the deep meaning (and pain) found in the paper on which Agnes has printed her thesis, the small things around her that would not even register to anyone else but that set off waves of emotion for Agnes. But Victor also has a light enough touch with all of this that it never feels oppressive for us, not that I could blame her if it did. It's all quite tough to balance, but the director pulls it off exceptionally well.
The Perfect Neighbor
It feels like we're going to see more movies like this one, documentaries made up almost entirely of bodycam footage from police officers, at least until someone decides police don't need to have bodycams anymore. One of the Oscar-nominated short films this year, Bill Morrison's remarkable Incident uses the same approach, although in that case, the actions of the police are the subject, whereas here the camera footage shows us the actions of everyday people and the horrible road it leads them down.
Geeta Gandbhir's documentary focuses on a "Stand Your Ground" case in Florida in which a white woman shot a black neighbor to death after a series of arguments over the course of a year or so. Arguments, it has to be noted, almost entirely instigated by the white woman. We see, through the police footage, the many, many (many) times the woman called the police because she wasn't happy about children in her neighborhood playing near her house. As far as the movie shows us, she had no leg to stand on, as it seems the children were rarely, if ever, actually on her property, and not a single neighbor backs up essentially any aspect of the white woman's side of things. Even the police (who, I have to say, do acquit themselves well in this movie, we often see them being quite reasonable and trying to deescalate various situations both with the eventual murderer and with her very angry neighbors) recognize that this woman is being petty and vindictive.
Pettiness, though, can lead to murder, and it does, and it's horrible, and it's gut-wrenching, and we aren't allowed to look away as the children of the murdered woman learn their mother is dead, and we see the horror of actions that can't be taken back in a place where we've made it so easy to take those actions. Everyone gets to have guns, and when you're dead, you're dead.
Gandbhir does a very good job stitching it all together, we get a clear idea of how this all happened, and (this is probably a spoiler, if you can spoil a real-life event) while so many of these stories end purely with outrage, this one does, at least, end with some justice, although the poor mother is still dead. The one filmmaking decision I question, though, is one I often find myself questioning in such serious documentaries— the movie is filled throughout with heavy, ominous music (more than once, the subtitles even say [Ominous music]), and this indicates to me that Gandbhir doesn't quite trust her film, or the audience, enough just to let the footage speak for itself. We don't need to be juiced by the music, what we're seeing is distressing and compelling enough. The footage is there. Morrison's Incident provides exactly the example we need that the music isn't necessary— long stretches of his film are completely silent because there was simply no audio to be had. He knows what he's got, and that it's enough. I only wish Gandbhir had been just as confident, because she's got the goods.
The Things You Kill
I feel I will keep this short, largely because I'll readily admit I'm not all that sure what the movie's director, Alireza Khatami, is truly getting at. And this is fine, I suspect this is exactly what he wants.
More or less, this is the story of a man who believes his father killed his mother, and who takes a horrible action to avenge the woman's death. It's also the story of that man and his own wife, as they struggle to conceive, and he struggles more with his own feelings of inadequacy i that regard (his sperm count is severely low). It's also, especially, the story of the enormous damage fathers can do to their sons, and the sons' anger and fear of doing some of that damage themselves.
But none of this is told straightforwardly, as our man meets a mysterious wanderer who he hires to tend his garden, the two men do their horrible deed, and then, without explanation, simply switch places— the gardener is now our man, and his family treats him as if he is who he's always been, even though we, the audience, can see he's not, and that our man is also still present (if a bit... tied up). Khatami teases at what he might be getting at a little bit when our man, a university professor, talks to his class about the etymology of the word "translation," and how, in Turkish, at least, it goes back to another word meaning "to kill." What is Khatami really saying? Does it matter? A movie like this can seem painfully self-indulgent, as if it's being strange to be strange, but this is made well enough that it doesn't give that impression, even if it's not quite on the level of Lynch's Lost Highway or Kiarostami's Certified Copy, two movies it seems to take as inspiration (Lynch's film simply in the "switched identities" way, it's far too easy simply to call a strange film "Lynchian" when it's not, and that's not what I mean here— Khatami does seem to be tending closer to the Kiarostami as inspiration, even if it's not entirely like that film, either). Interestingly, the movie may be too formally adept to really give us the feelings we need to experience something like this, but it does leave us more with questions than outright confusion, and a movie that can do that has something going for it.
Thursday, 1/30
Train Dreams
The best movie of the day and will very possibly be the best of the festival. I was swept away within a matter of seconds.
Director Clint Bentley wears his influences proudly (Malick, most obviously, and Malick’s artistic heirs [you’ll find a little early David Gordon Green and some David Lowery here], some Kelly Reichardt [you can’t make a movie that celebrates the Pacific Northwest without a little Reichardt], and very definitely Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), which isn’t to say this isn’t Bentley’s own film, just that he’s not pretending we don’t all have other artists who inspire us. This one stars Joel Edgerton, as good here as he’s ever been, as Robert Grainer, a man living in the early 20th century in Washington, who we first see helping to build the railroad before he moves on to being a logger, a sawyer, taking down the vast forest with his hands and a saw. We’re told his story in voiceover, by a narrator, and it makes us feel as if we’re being told a fable—well, maybe not a fable, maybe a more universal story? Or, an American story? But not the one we like to pretend exists, the one about bootstraps and such, more a story of a smaller life, as Grainer works, loves, marries, suffers unspeakable loss, and simply tries to make his way in a world that is changing drastically around him.
And much of this film makes us feel and recognize the passage of time and the enormous differences between one year and another, both within a single life and all around it. The bridge Grainier builds gives way to a much more modern version decades later. A young man becomes old and sees through the eyes of the old men who were around him when he was young. Lives blink away. Lives continue on. And the men cut the forest, the forest that’s been there for thousands of years, and we know, from where we are in our current time, where this is all going and what all this change will mean. And throughout, Grainier lives, never quite feeling connected to his world (except, probably, when he’s with his family), despite being in such an undeniably beautiful and rich place as the Washington forest. But, then, those trees will fight back, and he’s cutting them down, and maybe he can’t connect precisely because of this.
(One note: A character refers to Kansas, saying, “That state is a collection of savage lunatics,” and I resent this.)
Serious People
The first of two movies today where people play fictionalized versions of themselves, although in both cases I’m not entirely sure where reality ends and fiction begins. I can guess here, but the world is strange! The movie is directed by, and stars, Pasqual Guttierez (it’s co-directed by Ben Mullinkosson), who is a real-life music video director, having done work with major artists including The Weeknd and Bad Bunny. He directs videos with a partner, R.J. Sanchez, as a duo known as Cliqua, and all of this is still true in this film (Sanchez also appears as himself). What’s also true is that Pasqual’s wife is pregnant, due in a couple of months, which turns out to be exactly the time when Drake wants to hire Cliqua to shoot a video for him. Pasqual and R.J. are certain (and correct, presumably) that R.J. could just do the work on his own so that Pasqual could be at the birth of his child, but Drake’s people insist on Cliqua. So Pasqual concocts a scheme to hire an actor to pretend to be him at the video shoot with the idea that R.J. will run the show, the actor will just be there to satisfy Drake, and Pasqual can attend to the more important business of family.
Surprise surprise, none of this works as planned, since the actor Pasqual hires, Miguel, has his own directorial ambitions and a vision quite different from Cliqua’s (he wants strippers flying through the air and through fire, and truly, who can say he’s wrong?). But what also happens is that Pasqual begins to attend a little too much to Miguel, neglecting his wife, and even ceding artistic control to Miguel despite the obvious catastrophe it’s causing. And we can see how Pasqual, the real person, is using this to wrestle with his own apprehension about being a father and what that will all mean for him.
Guttierez does a really nice job of letting the comedy come to him—even though the movie is less than 90 minutes, it doesn’t feel like they’re rushing anything, and a lot of scenes are just left to breathe, making me wonder how much was written and how much was improvised. He’s also surprisingly self-deprecating and not at all showy with the filmmaking, especially (also also surprisingly?) for someone who has had major success with music videos. I’m not sure we reach any grand conclusions with this movie, but I don’t know that we have to. It’s fun and meaningful, and that’s plenty.
East of Wall
Even though I’ve lived nearly my entire life in Kansas, I have essentially no interest at all in cowboy-type stuff—hats, boots, horses, dirt, rodeo, ropes… not for me! And so a movie where these are major parts of the proceedings is already starting off on its back foot for me (and I don’t mean movies in the “western” genre, I mean movies where rodeos and horses and the rest are a focal point). This is entirely my problem, not any movie’s problem, but I have to admit my biases up front.
There are movies that can transcend this—Chloé Zhao’s The Rider was the best movie of 2017, and also the movie I immediately thought of while watching this film, not just because of the subject matter, but because, like Zhao, director Kate Beecroft casts real people, untrained actors, as fictional versions of themselves. The movie centers on Tabatha Zimiga, a woman who owns a ranch in the Badlands of South Dakota and who is an expert at all things horse-related, running a business raising and selling horses. Her teenage daughter, Porshia, is a magnificent rider, and the two are surrounded by other people who work on the ranch, by the children of parents who have fallen by the wayside (some are in prison, some are drunks, some are just not good at being parents). Tabatha’s husband died not long ago, and she’s doing her best simply to manage the whole situation. One day, a rancher from Texas shows up and offers to buy her out, which gives her a difficult decision (the rancher is played by Scoot McNairy, who I don’t believe is actually a rancher from Texas, so not every character is a fictional version of themselves, although I suppose I could be wrong here).
Tabatha is quite plainly a remarkable woman, and there’s a lot that’s admirable about this film—it’s wonderful to see women at the forefront of this kind of work, which often seems so male-dominated. There are times it’s thrilling to watch Porshia ride, and especially when she’s riding faster than it seems any person could, as what you imagine is such a violent motion appears so fluid and effortless. Beecroft uses approaches we’ve seen in similar films where we hear people telling their real stories, of their lives, of their trauma, and these scenes are often as emotionally affecting as you’d think. And no one can deny the beauty of the Badlands, even if the movie’s camera work is occasionally a little to excitable and the obvious drone shots are distracting.
But, still, for me, none of it is quite transcendent enough to keep me captured. The movie is a fine example of this kind of filmmaking, and of course I’ll say nothing negative about any of the people involved. There are, though, better versions of this kind of thing out there, which is not to say this one shouldn’t have been made, but just that, given all of this, it had a lot of ground to make up for me. And it doesn’t quite get there.
Wednesday, 1/29
Predators
I never watched the Dateline segment "To Catch a Predator," and the opening of David Osit's excellent, painful documentary showed me why that was exactly the right decision for me. It shows us a piece of the show, with a man coming into a house expecting to have sex with an underage girl, at which point the show's host, Chris Hansen, comes in and delivers his famous lines, making it clear to the man that this has all been a setup. And the entire thing made me feel disgusting and sick to my stomach, wondering how anyone could watch this time after time.
And yes, OF COURSE, part of it is because of the nature of what we're seeing, what the men who are "caught" on this show were doing is reprehensible, obscene, unconscionable, whatever extreme negative you want to use. Let's acknowledge that right here so I don't have to keep saying it. But what also made me sick was the entire exploitative nature of the whole ordeal. This was misery packaged as entertainment, regardless of what "good" Hansen and his show may or may not have been doing. And a lot of what Osit does in this film interrogates that part of Hansen's show, more or less asking the question (that's never answered), "What are we really doing here?"
We learn, eventually, that Osit himself was abused as a child and that part of his intention in making the film is to try to get some kind of understanding of what would make men prey on children, while also describing how "To Catch a Predator" was never truly interested in that understanding, despite Hansen's common refrain, "Help me understand." Osit uses a wide range of footage that was broadcast, and, crucially, that was never aired, to expose to us a situation that's a whole lot more layered and complicated— and deeply sad— than the one presented to a mass audience week after week. We see in raw footage what really happened to these men after their fantasy bubbles popped, and it humanizes them in a way that might be uncomfortable for us to acknowledge, given the enormous temptation to view them as purely evil creatures. And we see how, especially after the show got so hugely popular, much of the actual law enforcement took a back seat to the entertainment of the whole thing— the TV was driving the actions of the police rather than the police making good decisions for the cases at hand. The lure of showbiz is strong, and some of the detectives Osit interviews admit the mistakes they made in getting so swept up in it all.
All of which is only part of what Osit shows us here, continuing on to examine copycat versions of the show that have popped up, with hosts who, probably like Hansen, are certain they are doing this for the communal good but are also very happy to have their faces on screen (at one point, Hansen tells Osit that all of these knockoff shows are doing what they do "for clicks and profit," but that he does it for a greater purpose, and, well, we wonder). And it's almost stunning to see how easy it is for people to compartmentalize what they're doing when they're creating these shows— one host, who calls himself Skeet Hansen, listens to a man break down after being caught, hears the man express thoughts of suicide, and then says to the man, very somberly and (faux-)compassionately, "Well, you've just been Skeeted." (Reader, my jaw dropped.)
Osit's work here in building each part of the story and in building his own case (a case for the unacknowledged complexity of the whole ordeal, at least) is fantastic, as he makes us uncomfortable in the ways we need to be if we're ever going to have any real understanding of these men and, just as importantly, our own interest in the misery of others.
The Virgin of the Quarry Lake
I suspect, to some degree, where your sympathies lie when you watch this film will depend on when in your life you watch it. There is nothing quite like an angry and spurned teenage girl, and boy howdy, if this doesn't put us right there in it.
Nati lives in Argentina and has a small group of friends, one boy and two other girls. It seems they all grew up together, but now they're all having their sexual awakenings, and Nati has eyes (and more) for Diego, the boy in their group, who has unquestionably returned some of Nati's affection. But Silvia, an older woman ("older," like, somewhere in her twenties) has arrived and is taking Diego's attention, and Nati is having none of it.
The movie opens with some surprising and graphic violence, with a homeless man being accosted by one of Nati's neighbors, which sets off one thread of the story (I learn the movie is based on a pair of short stories, which makes sense in that it often seems like two roughly parallel ideas are running through the film), as the people in Nati's neighborhood are often lamenting the decay of their society. As I, myself, lament each year during this festival, I don't have the necessary cultural context to fully examine this part of the movie, but complaints about homelessness and societal decay are certainly not unfamiliar to us.
But the violence is fairly shocking, and the movie is punctuated by a few other moments of similarly shocking violence, often shocking because we kind of forget the possibility of such brutality as we're involved with the rest of the film. This is, in a sense, a coming-of-age story for Nati, as her summer turns out to be not at all what she'd hoped with the arrival of Silvia, and she has to figure out how to manage those feelings. But, as mentioned, a teenage girl's feelings can be strong, and when we're that age, we don't always think about things we can't take back (nor do we always feel bad about those things right away), and when it becomes clear to Nati that there is power beyond what we can see, she realizes her ability to destroy.
But how do we feel about all this? I wonder. I felt my sympathies shift around, as I do remember what it was like to be a teenager and how intense those feelings were (even as a boy), but in truth, Silvia and Diego do very little a reasonable person would consider to be wrong. Nati is not a reasonable person, but this is hardly her fault, it's just her station in life at this point. Were I a teenager, I would probably also want to see the world burn.
The movie's director, Laura Casabé, keeps us slightly off balance throughout, as it always feels like something apocalyptic might be right around the corner, even when what we're seeing is much like what might happen in any other coming-of-age story (while I was watching, I thought how many different other versions of this film could exist, depending on the direction— it could be broad comedy, it could be a quiet, contemplative story of growing up, or whatever else you'd want). And I liked that she doesn't tell us what to think, and, indeed, maybe she couldn't: a lot will depend on what we bring to the movie ourselves.
Twinless
This could have all gone so wrong. James Sweeney's movie is sweet and heartfelt, and you can easily see how he could have fallen off his tightrope into something broader, or louder, or less sensitive and compassionate.
But it helps when you care about your characters, and I think that makes a big difference for Sweeney here. He plays Dennis, who meets Roman at a support group for people who had twins who've died. Roman's brother, Rocky, passed a few months earlier, and it's clear Roman is rudderless, and just as clear that Dennis understands where Roman is coming from. As it turns out, Rocky was gay (Roman is not), and Dennis is gay, so Roman also sees an opportunity in Dennis to understand his own brother a little bit more.
But this all isn't exactly the situation we really have on our hands. And while it's only about 20 minutes in when everything changes, I won't reveal that here, except to say that Dennis isn't being entirely above board with his own story. And where it goes, and what Dennis does, and the entire tenor of the film could have felt much, much creepier than it does, largely because Sweeney treats Dennis like a real person, a person who makes bad decisions, but not because he's a creep, or conniving, but because he's sad, and fairly awkward, and lonely, and needs some comfort and kindness in his life that he's not finding.
Just as important to it all is Roman, who's trying to find his own way, and seems to have been in that situation even before his brother's death. Roman isn't terrifically bright, he has problems with anger, and he has a lot of trouble seeing himself as truly worthy of much of anything. And Dennis provides some things for him that he's also not finding, a large part of that being acceptance and understanding.
Both leads are fantastic, with Dylan O'Brien especially good in a dual role as Roman and (in flashback) Rocky— on paper these men have traits that we've seen hundreds of times before, but, again, the actors give them real humanity and approach them with compassion. I'm not entirely convinced Sweeney couldn't have told a similar story without the, um, issue that runs through the movie, and I'm also not entirely convinced a version of this movie that didn't have that issue wouldn't have been better. I get it, it adds a concept and drama and conflict, but Sweeney and O'Brien are so adept at the human side of things that I'm not sure something so manufactured is really needed. Still, even that part of the film (I say "part," it's a pretty major thing!) isn't treated cartoonishly. Whether it really needs to be here or not, Sweeney doesn't fumble it.
