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I am that man.
🕑 Added 2019-11-29 02:23:22 +0000 UTC
A man goes to the movies. A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man.
-Robert Warshow
One sees this quotation a lot in this field, mostly as a kind of half-apologia, half-embrasure of subjectivity in film criticism. I think we all implicitly understand that if we become "that man (or woman)" too profoundly, we risk making judgments so idiosyncratic that they are essentially diary entries, having much more to say about our state of mind than about the object under consideration. But we can't avoid the fact that the encounter with any art object occurs within a broader context that is often accidental and haphazard.
Over the past two nights, I happened to see two films about family and loss, success and failure, selfishness and generosity. These viewings coincided with some personal failures and a large, very painful argument with my wife. Most of this is resolved now, but I can't help but suspect that these factors partially shaped my reaction to these films. This is particularly the case since my overall response to both of them is far out of sync with critical consensus. Granted, that's happened before, but I am taking my own judgments with a grain of salt, and I guess I'm saying that you should too.
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)
My dominant impression of Baumbach's latest is, I suppose every generation gets the Ingmar Bergman it deserves. This is a difficult film to evaluate, precisely because everything I found so profoundly wrong with it could just as easily be regarded as a positive, if one were so inclined. Is it a callow, narcissistic film, or a film about callow narcissists? Does it fail to distinguish theatricality from genuine emotion, or is about the plight of theatre folk who are incapable of expressing real feelings? Etc. And perhaps above all, is the entire project an unethical pseudo-portrait of Baumbach's ex-wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, or is it a document of Baumbach's continued inability to understand her side of the end of their marriage?
Given that Marriage Story plays to me very much like an approximation of 1980s-90s Woody Allen, as opposed to contemporary Hong Sangsoo, I am not willing to grant Baumbach the postmodernist benefit of the doubt. This is a film that makes just enough nods to self-criticism to avoid being branded as a misogynist hissy fit, with Charlie (Adam Driver) appearing clueless about his family's obvious move to L.A. without him, or his berating of Nicole (Scarlett Johannson) in an empty apartment, telling her he wished she were dead. (He immediately apologizes.)
But mostly, Marriage Story shows Nicole returning into the arms of her family, a support system Charlie doesn't really have in the same way. With the help of Nora (Laura Dern), a tough-as-nails feminist lawyer, Nicole slowly starts stripping him of parental rights. This is a movie a Men's Rights Activist could really get behind. Meanwhile, we only really learn about Nicole's story in a highly artificial monologue in Nora's office. Constructed and performed like a Samuel French audition piece, this look into Nicole's subject position is so phony, I was reminded of the moment in Imitation of Life when Lana Turner's daughter tells her "mother, stop acting!" Johannson's rather dead-eyed movement through Marriage Story doesn't help matters. But the overwhelming feeling is that Baumbach either cannot or will not understand who this woman really is, even after all this time.
And then, as a kind of Hail Mary pass, we get two numbers from Sondheim's Company. Marriage Story is a film that reeks of blinkered privilege, that seems to believe that simply the gesture of trying to tell someone else's narrative is an act of generosity, regardless of how self-servingly you construct it.
The Farewell (Lulu Wang, 2019)
Seeing The Farewell after Marriage Story was something of a tonic, but it's also one of those instances in which I feel a bit guilty for not liking the film more. As we all know, fiction writers are always told to "write what you know," but I often wonder about the wisdom of that injunction. Sometimes autobiography lacks the distance necessary to give the material the proper formal shape, and that's kind of what's happening in The Farewell, a film that is amiable to a fault but sort of meandering.
This is Lulu Wang's second feature, and it's clear she is going for a Hirokazu Kore-eda vibe, wherein family dynamics, and the small micro-shifts that occur within those dynamics in the face of a larger crisis, provide a recalibrated sense of dramatic force. In many ways Wang achieves this. The central conflict of The Farewell is the fact that family matriarch Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) is dying of cancer, and the family has decided not to tell her, as per Chinese custom. ("If you tell someone they have cancer, they will die.") So the family concocts a shotgun wedding of sorts between a grandson and his girlfriend to make an excuse for everyone to come home to see her before she passes.
My main difficulty is that Wang's film is a true hybrid of Asian family drama of the Kore-eda / Edward Yang school and an American Sundance indie. And while this fusion is absolutely "correct" given the film's overarching theme of cultural diaspora and the loss / retrieval of identity and tradition, it makes for some rather irksome directorial choices. One of these involves selecting a central character -- Chinese-American granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina) -- to anchor the cast, when a more organically flowing ensemble piece would have provided a richer perspective on the way diaspora affects the various generations, those who made the decision to emigrate and those who had no say in it. But then, this is based on Wang's own story, and so she placed herself at the center. Lack of distance = structural mistake. But again, it's only her second film, so I wish her better luck next time.
