Film Nerd 2.0 asks: Can you share problematic movies with your kids?
We give three difficult faves a spin to find out
I’m counting down to Toshi’s 15th birthday next week and I may be more excited about it than he is.
None of the normal options are on the table, and I can’t help but flash back a year to the way we celebrated last time. I took him to his very first midnight show, which also happened to be his very first trip to the New Beverly. It was awesome, and I’d been working on something for this year that would have been even more fun. The whole world’s on pause, of course. In the end, what’s really important is the time I get to spend with him on his birthday. It’s one of the only times of the year where I get one-on-one time with either of them, when it’s just me and that particular kid, and we get to really talk for a few days. Allen’s birthday in March was terrific, and he got lucky, because that was also the last time any of us went to a movie theater. I’m not sure how many more years I’ve got with Toshi wanting to spend birthdays with me instead of his friends, so they’re getting more bittersweet every year.
Before his birthday, though, we’ve got Hamilton this week. Our whole family was set to see the show live in Hollywood in May of this year, on my 50th birthday, and it was a huge kick in the teeth to have to give those tickets up as everything shut down. We’re going to make an event of it on Friday night and I’m realizing that’s become the way to handle all of this chaos outside. We’ve gotten far more formal about the things we’re doing here at home, trying to make each of these moments special precisely because everything’s become so flat and homogenous as we’re all stuck at home.
For example, later this month, I’m planning a film festival for the boys. We’ve done this before, when they were very young and I was going to five or six or even seven film festivals every year. They wanted to know what it was like, so I made them badges and I set a program and I made them leave my office between movies and then line up to get the seat they wanted and we had guests and we had introductions and it was as much like a real festival as you can get with one couch, four people in the audience, a bunch of stuffed animals, and a hard bedtime of 10:00.
They’re older now, and as we’ve been talking lately, it’s clear that there are a number of films that they have seen but that they don’t really remember, or films that Toshi has seen that Allen hasn’t, and with all of that in mind, we’re going to turn this into a giant Summer Catch-Up Film Festival. Everything we’re screening has been screened before for either one of them or both of them, but by the end of this festival, they will actually remember these movies instead of just having a vague notion that they’ve seen them.
And, look, you take your chances right now the same way you did when you went to the theater. We made Jon Stewart’s Irresistible the centerpiece of our Friday night last week, and while I thought it was amiable, there are some big problems with it, and overall, that was not really the best way we could have spent that time. I also didn’t have much to say about it, so I’m glad I just watched it for fun, not for work. Am I glad we had that option right now? Yes. Totally. But I don’t really think the bar should be lower just because we’re all trapped at home. If anything, I’m trying to use this time to finally dig into some bigger, weightier films with the boys, and it’s been rewarding.
Not easy, but rewarding…
FILM NERD PROBLEMATIC AF
How do you feel about Rain Man? Or Silence of the Lambs? Or The Color Purple?
All three of those films were highly praised, both when they were released and in ongoing waves since then. All three of those films were highly controversial. All three of those films are intensely disliked by many people, both when they were released and in evolving waves since then. All of those things are true, and all are understandable, and in today’s climate, it seems like many people’s solution to encountering all of those ideas at once would be to simply pretend those films don’t exist. Or conversely, to watch them and pretend that no one’s complaints about them mean anything.
I’m not much of a fan of judging movies only on the way they interact with the real world. For example, it’s been bizarre watching Hollywood’s reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement. Very few of their responses do anything to address the very real problem of systemic racist violence baked into the police system right now, because honestly, what control does Hollywood have over that? If they really wanted to address those concerns, it would make more sense to look at the way copaganda has been a cornerstone of mainstream entertainment media as long as we’ve had mainstream entertainment media, and the way we allow police to control what can or can’t be said in them in the films and TV shows produced with their “co-operation.” Or it would make sense to look at the way the real power in this town remains startlingly white and address that the level of who is making decisions about what gets made and who is actually signing those checks. Instead, Hollywood has picked this moment to make big symbolic gestures, and some of them may genuinely be good and progressive decisions, but none of them address the underlying complaints about systemic racist violence in police forces or economic power in the industry. And here’s the truth that I wish people would internalize: that’s because Hollywood is generally terrible at responding to real-world issues and no one should look to movies or the people who make them for moral leadership.
That’s not to say films are without moral implications or that you should simply be nihilistic about what you ingest as a watcher or a reader. But when you’re dealing with movies, you’re dealing with entertainment that is made by dozens or even hundreds or thousands of people working together, and there are a million creative and technical decisions that get made on anything you’re watching, and those choices are all being made by flawed, normal human beings, all of them hopefully working toward the same goal, which is ultimately a business venture, not a social experiment. By the very nature of this venture, you’re going to get contradictory ideas and ideologies at work in the same projects, and that push and pull is part of what makes art so interesting. It’s also why it’s dangerous trying to hold every single film up to some idealized purity test that you expect them all to pass.
Instead, I think you have to approach film the same way you do with anything else. Be open to it, but be aware of the way things are presented to you, and always feel free to ask questions and dig deeper. That, more than anything, has been what I’ve tried to instill in my kids as movie viewers, and as they’ve started recently taking big steps into more adult fare, those conversations we have after the films are more important than ever. I want to be proud of the men I release into the world when they’re adults, and I’m aware of just how easy it is to be lazy and complacent about what they watch or listen to or play. When you’re young, context can be everything. It’s one of the reasons I’d much rather see solutions like HBO Max’s decision to contextualize Gone With The Wind rather than censoring or removing it. In order to understand where we are, we need to be able to see and discuss where we’ve been.
That’s not the same thing as saying that everyone has to watch everything, because I think there are films that are significant that I have no intention of ever sharing with my kids. I’ll talk to them about films like Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation in order to put them into context and to discuss the way those films have rippled through pop culture, but why would I actually sit them down and show them films designed to indoctrinate them into hate and bigotry? I don’t think every single film buff has to see every single film just to see them. Art isn’t a checklist that you have to complete.
More than ever, I would challenge you to think about why you’re watching what you’re watching, especially as you share things with younger viewers. There are two important principals at work in creating a healthy ongoing media diet you can share with your kids. First, you have to know just how much you can challenge them without crossing a line, because that’s an important part of developing their ongoing habits as a viewer, and second, you have to listen to them as they tell you what they’re interested in seeing. Those are foundational ideas, and I try to practice them with my own kids.
Right now, they’re interested in the ‘80s. They’re very interested in the ‘70s. They want to see movies that were nominated for big awards or that won big awards. They want to see “the classics,” and they’re hungry for variety. They cast a fairly broad net in terms of what they’ll watch, and they like being shown things that “aren’t for kids.”
To that end, I try to put together playlists for each time they come to stay here. Every night, we watch something. And on a recent visit, we managed to work in four films in three days, and all four of them ended up feeling like fairly big meals. We started on a Friday night with a film I was fully crazy about when it was first released in 1988, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man. For many people, this was the first mainstream mention of autism, and by today’s standards, there’s something positively quaint about it. What still works beautifully is the way Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman play off of one another, and the way Charlie Babbitt slowly but surely comes to appreciate his brother as something other than a bargaining tool. Hoffman won the awards for the film, but this was during that first real heat of Cruise doing his best to prove that he deserved to be in the conversation. He went from hot filmmaker to hot filmmaker, hot project to hot project, and there was a real hunger to the work he did. He’s on fire in this film, and Hoffman’s work is more nuanced than I remembered. He does far more than the tics and mannerisms that have been endlessly imitated since the film came out, and it’s only when you watch the whole film that you really remember how beautiful they are together.
One of the dangers in reducing films to their components is that the most sincere efforts can get it wrong, and you ultimately are defined largely by the moment in which you work. Rain Man was a landmark in terms of introducing the word autism into a larger national consciousness, and it certainly changed my own awareness of autism. The first thing I learned after seeing the film is how rare the actual “savant” side of things is, and how autism is a much broader spectrum of behavior than any conversation in the film would suggest. That’s fine. This isn’t a film about every autistic person, nor is it trying to be. Instead, it’s about a journey toward empathy for someone who seems to start the movie completely ill-equipped to care for someone else. By that, I mean Charlie, the Tom Cruise character, because he’s the one who is truly stunted in the film. Raymond, Hoffman’s character, may be on the spectrum and have certain challenges he faces in terms of basic social interaction, but there’s a peace to the life that Raymond has built for himself. Charlie’s the one who I would call damaged or broken, and the film doesn’t make it as easy as “he learns to love his brother and it heals them both.” Instead, Raymond is the immovable object and the unstoppable force both, and Charlie is just left throwing himself up against that over and over until he finally realizes what he’s doing.
Both of the boys fell in love with Raymond and the Hoffman performance, and I noticed that the same thing happened to them that happened to me and my friends when we saw the film in ’88. Almost immediately, that dialogue is dug in deep, and they can’t help but quote it. It’s fitting that Raymond spends the entire film reciting “Who’s On First” as a sort of self-soothing tool because much of the dialogue between Raymond and Charlie is genuinely laugh-out loud funny. Raymond is simply who he is, and the comedy comes from watching how frustrated and ill-equipped Charlie is. I always think of Charlie’s meltdown over Raymond’s missing underwear, Cruise getting all high-pitched and squeaky the angrier he gets, screaming, “Underwear is underwear!” at his brother in that Mickey Mouse voice of his while Raymond just calmly calls back, “Boxer shorts! K-mart!” and I cackle anew every time. After the film, we talked about how hard Hoffman worked to figure out his approach to the character and how nervous he was about being disrespectful. We talked about how Raymond’s “superpowers” aren’t the norm and how broad that spectrum can be. We talked about how there are plenty of people who live independent adult lives who are on that spectrum, and I mentioned one person in particular who was diagnosed late in his life, Sir Anthony Hopkins.
The boys saw Michael Mann’s Manhunter last year. I intentionally showed them that film when I did because I think you should see it before you see Jonathan Demme’s amazing adaptation of the next book by Thomas Harris, and sure enough, it set the table the right way for Saturday night’s viewing of Silence of the Lambs.
The landscape today for queer representation on the film may not be perfect, but it’s positively remarkable compared to the way gay identity was handled onscreen in 1991. It’s easy to forget with the distance of time just how powerfully homophobic the ‘80s were, end-to-end, and how often gay people were portrayed as sick or damaged or the butt of the joke. Casual homophobia didn’t disappear at the end of the decade, even though we did start to see more and more prominent gay voices starting to break through in film. There were definite baby steps being made as the ‘80s gave way to the ‘90s, but I can see why the LGBTQ community must have felt frustrated and called out by the film. I think Demme’s response, reaching out to that community and responding with Philadelphia, his next film, speaks to where his heart was, and within the context of the film, it does feel like he went out of his way to remove Buffalo Bill from being representative of gay people entirely. They mention in the film that he’s not LGBTQ at all, and is instead a psychopath who is trying on that identity without really feeling it. For him, it’s all about his own pathology, and any notion of sexuality he has is tied up in power, not gender. Still, I can see how easy it would be to watch the film uncritically and see Buffalo Bill as representing other people.
Having said all of that, the film is an undeniably well-built thriller, and I still think it’s a double-edged sword of storytelling. It made Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter internationally famous on a level I’m sure Harris never imagined, but that success seems to have permanently broken Harris’ relationship with his own character. It seems so clear looking at Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs that the inevitable third chapter in the story would involve Will Graham and Clarice Starling having to deal with Lecter on the loose, but Harris seemed perversely dedicated to burning down expectations and affections with everything he’s written since. Oh, well. No matter. Silence stands as this amazing singular experience, and the duet between Hopkins and Jodie Foster remains just as captivating today as it was the first time you saw it. They’re both giving such great performances, and they’re each so responsive to the things the other one is doing, that you can watch the film as a workshop in character detail even if you don’t care about anything else. I love how much of Demme’s personality slips through in the cracks of the film, like his proclivity to cast musicians in all kinds of roles or his soundtrack choices, and I hope this sets the stage for the boys to explore more of Demme’s work in the near future.
On Father’s Day, we watched Short Term 12 in the afternoon, and The Color Purple in the evening. I am a big fan of Short Term 12 and everyone in it, and I figured it would be one that landed hard on Toshi in particular. As he wrestles with the early stages of being a teenager, he’s really enjoyed more challenging teenage fare like The Perks of Being A Wallflower, and Short Term 12 has such a great cast that have all gone on to other things that it’s fun to play “Oh, my god, they’re in it, too?” as you watch. The film has some very strong material about drug use, suicide, and abuse, and it made for a tough double-feature with Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which is one of the most beautiful catalogs of suffering ever created.
I don’t think I need to tell either of my kids that black lives matter; it seems to be something they inherently grasp in a way that is far more innate than what my generation wrestled with. I know I was a huge jump forward from my grandparents in terms of attitude, and I credit the children’s programming of the ‘70s like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers for working to counter-program me as I grew up in Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. But my kids are a huge jump forward from me, and things come easy to them that I had to work at, and I am grateful for it. I was curious to see how they would react to a movie that is about characters so far removed from their own experience, which I consider one of the points of watching movies in the first place, and The Color Purple ended up being one of the big hits of the weekend.
It helps that Spielberg’s biggest paintbrush is empathy. He loves Celie, and he clearly deeply loves Whoopi Goldberg, whose performance is such a wide-open act of love that it’s hard to resist. I think the entire cast is great, but I also think it’s interesting how the film leans on Hollywood’s vision of the South as much as it leans on Walker’s wonderful, lyrical text. That’s Spielberg, though, especially at this point in his growth as a storyteller. He has always had a pronounced appetite for the artificial, and he makes no bones about it. He’s not trying to be invisible, to simply vanish into the story. His visual language is so vibrant and so dynamic that you can’t help but be aware of Spielberg and his control over you and your reactions. Yes, he’s manipulative. But, oh, my god, has anyone ever been more skilled at being the puppeteer?
It’s interesting to see how the collaboration with Quincy Jones, the first time in his entire career that Spielberg worked with someone besides John Williams, influenced the way the film feels. “Miss Celie’s Blues” is a particular highlight, and in many ways, the film feels like a musical even though, strictly speaking, it’s not. The film is built in movements, big sweeping sequences that cover a lot of ground in a short time, and that score by Jones is a big part of why it works. Every character is clearly defined visually and sonically, and he paints these characters big, memorable, iconic. The brilliance of Danny Glover’s Mister is he starts so scary, then gradually gets stripped down until he is revealed as a human-scale villain, and the eventual pricking of his conscience only comes after a staggering amount of cruelty on his part. I love Margaret Avery as Shug and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia and Rae Dawn Chong as Squeak, and I think it’s important that the film is defined by its women first. There are great male performances here, including Adolf Caesar, Willard Pugh, Carl Anderson, and Laurence Fishburne, who I’d forgotten is part of the film’s Greek chorus, but the women are the movie.
I hadn’t read Alice Walker’s truly remarkable book when I saw the film the first time. I was 15 when it came out. I look at the film now as Spielberg’s reaction to her book less than as a direct translation. Clearly, it moved him, and he did his best to get as much of it to the screen intact as he could. The surprise isn’t that he failed to get everything into the film; it’s that he got as much of it in as he did. A love story between two black women in the mainstream in 1985 from the biggest box-office sensation of his era was about as daring a way to spend his clout as he could have found, and while I would love to see a black American woman make her own version of The Color Purple at some point, that wouldn’t have happened in 1985, and that story would have been compromised to death by studios if it hadn’t had Spielberg standing over it. It is both frustrating that it took a white guy to get it made and inevitable at that time. It is infuriating that he had to suggest things so delicately, but I can’t imagine anything stronger having survived the process at that point.
There’s such love and care lavished on the production design and the cinematography that it does scrub off the harsher edges of truth, and the film feels polished to the point of Norman Rockwell shine. What made that interesting and subversive is how rarely that type of care and attention had ever been focused on these characters, centering them instead of pushing them to the background or the edge of the frame.
With all of these films, as with pretty much anything you share with younger viewers, the key is context. Talk through all of it. Talk as long as they want to talk. Go back and talk the next day. Listen to the questions they ask, and ask them questions. When you share any movie, especially movies that have elements that raise questions, it’s best to think of it as an experiment. Don’t just give it to them and walk away; hang around and see what it does. Every single time you have a family night, it’s a chance to create a larger conversation. That doesn’t mean it always has to be serious. I’ve got plenty of silly stuff on the schedule soon. It just means that you have to acknowledge that these films go in, they rattle around, and left unexplored or unexamined, you have no idea what’s actually getting through.
I can’t believe Toshi’s birthday triple-feature is less than a week away. What a year it’s going to be…
SNEAKY
So we get an announcement that Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy are making a Fallout series the same moment we get a teaser video?
Neat.
This intrigues me.
AND FINALLY…
I spent the morning he passed watching Carl Reiner’s The Man With Two Brains, and it’s weird feeling that sad about someone’s passing while laughing that hard. I love The Jerk and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and All Of Me, but I think I have a special fondness for this aggressively weird SF comedy. The jokes come so fast, and the film is so gleefully absurd on every front. I think Sissy Spacek is amazing as the voice of Anne Uumellmahaye, the brain that Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr falls in love with, as is Kathleen Turner as Delores, the “scum queen” who he marries. It’s a ridiculous film, a ridiculous premise, and I adore it.
Reiner’s work wasn’t just funny, though. It was groundbreaking, and he was one of those people who changed what other people thought they could do. There are generations of comedy writers who were influenced by him. Whole generations. It’s impossible to measure his influence, and silly to even try. He was a major voice in television, he was a major voice in film, and he continued creating comedy his entire life. I can’t tell you where to start in your own personal appreciation of his work, but I can urge you to take the time to really explore his work. I went back and just watched Enter Laughing, his very first film as a director, for example. Or just go to his Twitter feed and follow his film recommendations, since he and Mel Brooks got together every night to watch a movie. It’s clear Reiner’s love of art burned bright right to the bitter end, as did his fierce dedication to a better world for everyone.
Just last night, I watched the season three opening episode, “That’s My Boy?”, from The Dick Van Dyke Show, and without giving anything away, I can honestly say that’s one of the best punchlines from any sitcom ever. What a great episode. It feels fresh and funny now, and considering when this particular joke was made, the pay-off feels genuinely progressive. He was the real deal. They don’t make them like that anymore, and to be honest, they didn’t really make many like him in the first place. At 98, no one can say he is gone too soon, but it still feels like it. He will be greatly missed by friends and family alike.
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Image courtesy of MGM/UA
Image courtesy of MGM/UA
Image courtesy of Animal Kingdom/Cinedigm
Image courtesy of Warner Bros
Image courtesy of Warner Bros
I need to rewatch The Color Purple. I wasn't a big fan when I saw it a few years ago while filling in the gaps in my Spielberg filmography, but I just listened to Walker read the audiobook of the novel a few weeks ago and want to give the film another shot.
I do think it's one Spielberg movie where I wouldn't be annoyed at the idea of a remake though.
Some very thoughtful takes here!
I am on the spectrum myself, Aspergers-diagnosed (or high functioning as some might call it). My main issue with "Rain Man" as a film is that the Vegas stretch ends up more drawn-out than it should have been (the subplot with Valeria Golino is interesting, but doesn't have a strong enough payoff). I wouldn't have given it the Best Picture Oscar over "The Accidental Tourist", especially when "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" wasn't even invited to that party, but it is one of those films that's more sensitive than its reputation and all the parodies suggest, and in hindsight it's pretty cruel that it and other films around that time like "Forrest Gump" or "Nell" became such easy fodder for funny voices and mockery in the '90s. It's also a shame that autism hasn't broken through much further into mainstream entertainment in the 3 decades since, especially non-savant portrayals. If it had, I think this movie would be better appreciated for what it accomplished, as Steve Silbering did so well in the chapter devoted to it in "Neurotribes". (This is where headcanons come in handy for some of us, as you discussed in the Cronenberg Screen Drafts with regards to "The Fly". Would you like to hear about my feelings on Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" and Belle?)
I like "The Color Purple" a lot, and that final shot is up there with that of "E.T." among Spielberg's best closing beats. It is nice that the story has found life in other venues since then by way of the stage musical adaptation that Winfrey and Jones backed, which seems to have a serious cult following.