Now that we’re actually doing this, trying something that’s not a year-end list but that honors the end of the year, I’m enjoying myself. I can see why you might limit yourself to ten spots on a list because left to my own devices, I’ve got a lot to say.
Part of it is that I sat out much of 2019 and haven’t been able to weigh in on a lot of this year’s movies. But part of it is that this feels so much more fun than struggling to figure out where to fit everything on a list. I spent so much time thinking about it in years past that I often felt myself dropping things off the list just so I could make sure to sneak in a paragraph or two about something, so the lists would end up being the best juggling off all of the various agendas I had about what was important in film, and they never felt like they were finished, and even now, if I had to go back and rewrite each of those lists, they’d end up different simply by virtue of me being a different person at a different point in my life now.
Adam Sandler’s work in Uncut Gems is, without a doubt, one of the things most worth talking about in movies in 2019. One of many, sure, but one of them. And it’s less of a surprise than it should be, honestly. Sandler’s a good actor who shines with the right material. He’s also become very rich making movies that play to a very particular part of his talent, and those movies range from the delightfully silly to the seemingly indifferent. I’ve liked some of his work, disliked some of it, and find the most appealing thing about him to be the way he’s built a family of filmmakers in front of the camera and behind it, all of them working together over and over. Having said that, I think his best work has happened when he’s stepped out of his comfort zone and handed himself over to a filmmaker. Punch Drunk Love is a gorgeous movie and a great performance, and if everyone had gone Oscar crazy for him that year, I would have been perfectly fine with that. I’m sorry it didn’t happen for him this year, but I suspect he’ll be okay. He gave a tremendous performance, and the Safdies used him in such a specific way here. Howard Ratner’s whole life is built around risk, whether it’s the speculation-driven business he’s in, the high-wire act he navigates in his love life, or his incessant gambling, and from the very start of the film, Sandler gives Ratner this creeping anxious energy, like he’s constantly on the verge of getting up and running out of the room or, perhaps, crawling out of his own skin. He is discomfort incarnate.
Adam Sandler’s entire career is loosely based around one thematic idea, and if there’s any unifying thread in the films I’m talking about today, it’s this free-floating cloud of male rage that exists that we are all contending with, whether we grew up soaking in it and we’re trying to deprogram ourselves or we’re mourning the end of the cultural dominance of the Angry White Guy. Sandler has played it for laughs from the start with characters like Bobby Boucher in The Waterboy or Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore or Barry Egan, but those films also offer an honest critique of the way that rage drives those characters. The best of them is PTA’s Punch-Drunk Love, unsurprisingly, and I think of Barry often. He is so crippled by his fury that he’s practically turning himself inside out. Howard Ratner is like if Barry pretended to get his shit together without actually addressing any of his issues so that rage has just curdled and rotted and turned into this seething self-hatred that manifests in near-constant attempts to destroy himself. Howard’s not betting because he wants to win; he’s betting because he’s daring the world to destroy him.
Whatever you think of it, Joker occupies a prime chunk of 2019’s pop culture real estate. When Todd Phillips says that he made Joker so he could make a film like a ‘70s movie since you can’t make them anymore, it feels true, but it’s not. There are plenty of films made every year that could have been made during the heyday of the most adventurous era of studio filmmaking… but they’re not made by the studios. That’s just not the business right now. Phillips could make those movies if he wanted to, but he likes working with the support of a studio. Anytime he wants, he can go get some tiny indie films made. After all, he’s the guy who directed all three Hangover films. He’s bankable. So I feel less impressed by his “poor me” act. Filmmakers like the Safdies seem to be perfectly happy working the way they’re working, and the films they’re making are the real deal. Uncut Gems isn’t trying to be a ‘70s movie. It’s not a fetish object. It is simply an observational character-driven drama in which we drop into someone’s life for a very specific moment. That’s all. It’s all about the details of Howard’s life and the people around him and the way he keeps all the proverbial plates in his life spinning, and it’s about a gradual tightening of the noose. Darius Khondji gives the film an authentic scuzzy energy, jittery and dirty and gloriously ugly, and much of what I love is the duet between Sandler’s meltdown and Khondji’s camerawork. I’ve never seen anyone get so much tension out of malfunctioning doors. It’s a small film, and I mean that as a compliment. Not every film should be about apocalyptic stakes. Josh and Benny Safdie have been consistently chasing a particular aesthetic voice since they made their first short film, and Uncut Gems feels like an honest evolution of that voice.
That’s one of the things I’ve been more and more interested in as I’ve gotten older, finding honesty in even the most outrageous films. That’s when I find myself connecting to something. David Robert Mitchell’s Under The Silver Lake is a movie that is full of narrative rabbit holes and flights of fancy and conspiratorial fantasy and straight-up nonsense, but it is also about something very real, and it gets to it in an honest and interesting way. Sam, played by Andrew Garfield, is pretty much the default Movie Lead Character, a 33-year-old white guy, amiable and good-looking and blandly charming. On the surface, this is the story of a guy who meets a girl and then loses her, eventually plunging headlong into a mystery to try to find her. The real targets of Under The Silver Lake are much broader and more interesting than just some silly mystery, though, and it’s after the same things as Joker, but in a far more subtle and interesting way.
One of my biggest frustrations with Joker is the way it refuses to engage with any of the very serious ideas it raises, using mental illness and poverty and domestic abuse as justification and excuse and eventually laughing them off. Nothing in Joker matters because nothing is real, or maybe it is real, but maybe it’s not, and so no matter which way you try to read it, the film contradicts you. By design. Phillips is a misanthrope. He genuinely hates everyone, and his films do nothing to contradict that worldview. He’s not punching up or punching down; all that matters is punching and burning and mocking and making sure you let everyone know that none of it is important. It’s all just for laughs. Sam is the opposite of that; everything in his world matters, and it all matters desperately. It has to matter, because the opposite of that is that the world makes no sense and Sam’s just drifting along wasting time and resources and god knows that can’t be true. No, Sam must be the only one who can see through the code of the universe to perceive the truths that drive everything.
All of our pop culture prepares us for our Harry Potter moment, that moment when we are anointed and we learn we are the Chosen One, full of power and purpose and direction. We… and by we, I mean people who look like Sam, people who occupy the mainstream without having to work for it at all, people who were born with every advantage and who see it as what they are owed by the universe… cannot imagine that we are meant to live ordinary lives, and we spend every day waiting for that moment when our REAL life finally begins, when we are done waiting and all the pre-amble is finally over, and we step into the role we were obviously born to play. Both Sam and Arthur Fleck see everyone else in the world as extras in their movies, but Mitchell and Phillips approach these portraits of emotional entitlement in very different ways. Phillips rigs the deck, pouring so much misery on Arthur that he gives him permission for whatever he does, while Mitchell has no interest in letting Sam off the hook. Mitchell never makes it clear that Sam’s a toxic, angry, disaffected man, but that’s what makes the portrait so much more affecting. Sam truly believes he’s a Nice Guy, and everything he does in the film, he does out of a supposed concern for Sarah (Riley Keough) and her well-being.
Only… bullshit. That’s not why he’s chasing this phantom, this person he meets one time. Sam objectifies everyone in his world. He is incapable of real emotional connection because he has nothing to bring to the exchange. He’s constantly reading the symbols and the signs in the world around him, convinced that he’s smart because of the analytical way he puts everything together, but he is incapable of basic self-care and seems impossible to imagine employed anywhere. He appears to live off of his mother’s largesse, and he basically lives right on the knife’s edge of eviction at all times. He lives beyond his means but has no real interest in changing his income or bettering his situation, and there’s no urgency to anything. He’ll figure it out. It’ll take care of itself. Sam’s got other things to do, other concerns. Anyone watching him would see him drifting without any point, but in his head, he’s got a mission. That mission changes from day to day, whether it’s decoding Vanna White’s tics, solving a series of dog murders, or finding a supposedly-dead billionaire and a missing girl, and the sheer slippery nature of that mission is part of Sam’s pathology. He’d get his shit together, but the world is so fucked up and broken that he’s just got to solve this puzzle first. It is existential procrastination, and Sam appears to be driven mad in part by the sheer volume of input.
The Internet didn’t democratize the world, and it didn’t usher in a grand age of enlightenment. Mainly, it just buried us in information, and most of us drowned without realizing it. Guys like Sam think they’re swimming for the surface, and Mitchell’s laser-accurate snapshot of a whole broken generation of Sams is both heartbreaking and quietly terrifying. I’m way more scared of Sam than I am of Arthur Fleck. Arthur Fleck is the sadly predictable power play of shooting someone and claiming victimhood all in the name of “finding your voice,” but Sam is just drifting along out there, making the world shittier and crazier and more disconnected one day at a time. I feel like Under The Silver Lake is the film that offers the most room for discussion this year while still having a very firm and specific grip on what it’s saying. Ambiguity is often an excuse for not really saying much of anything at all, and that is not the case with Mitchell’s dense, robust text.
While I didn’t love Joker, its main value for me has been as a counterpoint when talking about ideas it raised and couldn’t execute that we saw played out better in other films. There’s a great throwaway line during Arthur’s mass shooter manifesto. “They think that we’ll just sit there and take it like good little boys! That we won’t werewolf and go wild!” There’s something so vivid about that phrasing, and that’s where Joker does work. There is blunt force craft at play in that film, so even when I think they whiff something, it’s executed beautifully. If anything, it’s too busy, and it doesn’t fully explore these provocative little corners it introduces. That’s where a movie like Monos really delivers for me. It’s slight in scale, but epic in terms of impact because of the way it so fully explores its set-up. Alejandro Landes doesn’t so much direct the story as he creates an atmosphere in which he unleashes this herd of feral lost boys and girls, an entire film of kids going werewolf. It’s hard to describe the film because so many of its strengths are experiential. The stark truth of child soldiers around the world is hard for a Western audience to digest, and Monos treats it like myth, painting in archetype. These kids are completely isolated from the outside world, totally indoctrinated, and within this society they’ve built, we watch as familiar patterns push and pull at them. Jasper Wolf’s photography is otherworldly, transporting, lush and gorgeous and rich no matter what he’s shooting here. The film is intentionally disorienting, never telling you where you are or what the larger world is doing outside the edge of the frame. Language is a barrier more than a way of communicating. It is pure filmmaking, intoxicating and brave.
I feel the same way about I Lost My Body, the French animated film by Jérémy Clapin. It knocked me out the first time I watched it, and I’ve put it on twice since then because I just plain like looking at it and listening to it. There’s a confidence to the filmmaking, and it is filled with indelible images and terrific performance work. I love animation, but I am weary from most of the way storytelling in studio animation is all at the same frantic emotional pitch. It all feels like it’s very much the same, even when I like a studio animated film. It’s rare that I put one on and I’m not sure what genre it’s going to be or what direction the story’s going. This movie literally opens with a severed hand escaping what appears to be a lab. Why was it chopped off? Where is its owner? Can they be reunited? The hand’s escape establishes it as a viable lead character with an expressive emotional range, and I love how clearly it communicates what it is thinking at every turn. And, yes, I think this film also deals with toxic male entitlement, but in a way that illustrates the potential for growth. So many guys buy into terrible, possessive ideas of “getting the girl” instead of building a real relationship with someone, and that’s no way to start something that is going to last. You have to respect the person you’re with, and you can’t just view them as a goal to be accomplished. Attraction can be instant; love is based on genuine respect. The film’s narrative twists and turns are not about being clever, but rather about landing certain emotional punches the right way, and what appears to be a fractured structure at first ends up being this beautiful story that delivers each of its pieces just so. Maybe my favorite love story of 2019, I Lost My Body is about the way we pursue those things we think we need and what we do when we find the things we really need, and it features a score by Dan Levy that is one of the year’s best.
I understand why someone might strongly dislike Jojo Rabbit. I wouldn’t argue with someone who was offended by the film. My own girlfriend found herself deeply conflicted by the film, admiring much of it while also feeling like it made light of something she couldn’t accept seeing trivialized. For me, it’s all about where you feel like the creator’s heart was while they were working, and Jojo Rabbit is clearly a film that is trying to tell the story of how someone is taught to hate, and how someone can be taught to love. It’s told entirely from the perspective of Jojo, so nothing we see in the film is literal. It’s not like Joker, though, in that we’re not meant to trust any of what we see. It all happens. It’s just that we’re seeing it through the eyes of this little boy whose father is gone and whose mother is determined to get them through the war intact. It’s true but it’s distorted. It’s an exercise in voice, and I think there’s something very pure and true about the child’s-eye view of life during fascism. He doesn’t realize quite what he’s doing, and his pure, ferocious belief in the propaganda in which he is awash isn’t evil. It’s simply what he’s being taught. His determination to believe the opposite of what his mother believes is more a little boy’s obstinance than a real referendum on his moral character. Little by little, basic human decency fights its way out, and the film’s sense of humor isn’t an accident, nor is it meant to distract you from the weight of what’s being discussed. Instead, it feels to me like a survival mechanism. Jojo knows, deep down, that there’s something wrong with Germany, and the Hitler who he buddies around with in his imagination is a pretty serious asshole from the jump. Sure, he’s Jojo’s “best friend,” but he’s clearly a selfish piece of trash in every conversation. There’s no big reveal. It’s just a gradual process in which Jojo allows himself to acknowledge what is already clear.
Julius Onah’s film Luce didn’t make much of a sound when it was released, and I’m confused, frankly. If there’s any film that feels like it is of the moment and central to many of the key conversations we’re having, it’s Luce. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play the adoptive parents of Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr), a child soldier from Eritrea. Luce is pretty much any parent’s dream, a successful athlete who also excels academically, beloved by parents and teachers and other students. He seems like the perfect kid, but there are cracks in the facade, and when his history teacher reaches out to his parents with some concerns, those cracks quickly begin to show. Harrison gives a remarkable performance, and he makes all of the various pressures that are at work on Luce very clear. Little by little, Peter and Amy start to realize that this liberal well-intentioned fantasy they had of plucking this little boy out of his terrible life so they could rebuild him as something better may not work out the way they thought. Luce is a complicated real person who isn’t “just” his past or his potential, but a combination of the two, and the rage that is constantly rumbling just below the surface of every choice he makes is understandable. What makes Luce so memorable is the way the film pushes into some wildly uncomfortable places without fear. Luce doesn’t sidestep the most difficult ideas that are raised by the film, and it doesn’t excuse or explain the character in any easy way. I’m not sure the film lands all of its ideas, but it clearly engages them. It is a dense film, and it feels like Julius Onah had a lot to say here, and I appreciate that while it deals with the toxic nature of anger, it does so from a different perspective, and without trying to excuse or justify it. Todd Phillips isn’t really angry about anything, and Joker rings hollow as a result. Simply wanting to do Scorsese cosplay doesn’t suddenly give you the insight to deal honestly with the fundamental questions about how we proceed as men in a world where we have been sold a broken idea of masculinity. I’d much rather watch these other films, each of which came from a more genuine and interesting place.
We are halfway through this wrap-up now, and the next three parts are each going to be a lot of fun for me. The next one, in particular, is about a subject that’s near and dear to my heart. After those, then I’ll write a stand-alone piece that is about the film that is my favorite of 2019, a film that I have studiously not written about until now. I’ve got a lot to say, because I’ve been digging into it repeatedly, talking about it, watching it. I’ve seen it in the theater repeatedly, at home repeatedly, and I am still just as fascinated by all of its various magic tricks as I was when I first saw it. I can’t imagine 2019 without it.
But not yet. We’ve got lots to do before then. And there’s a new Friday Snapshot coming for you this week as well. I hope you’re not tired of getting these e-mails yet because I feel like I’m just warming up…
Image courtesy A24 Films