On Film

FOR A YEAR defined by isolation, 2020 has been fascinatingly full of stories about relationship. It feels oddly appropriate that during a time when we’re constantly confronting our divisions—ideological and physical—we’ve been surrounded by cinematic reminders of the importance of community and the various ways we find it. Films of 2020 have come out largely through streaming platforms, and we’ve watched them in our homes, by ourselves. They’ve still managed, however, to inspire connection.

Kirsten Johnson’s documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead chronicled her father’s dementia by celebrating her dad’s life, while Natalie Erika James’ horror film Relic addressed the real-life existential terror of watching a loved one’s mind fade to the same disease. Other films such as Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods and Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks examined how adult children relate to their parents’ flaws. Of course, family doesn’t have to mean the people we share our genes with. Movies this year addressed found families too, from Crip Camp’s community of disability activists to The Old Guard’s fiercely devoted group of immortal warriors. Even popcorn fare such as Bill & Ted Face the Music celebrated the way long-standing bonds support us throughout our lives and help us in turn to love others.

THE HYMN “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” is one of my favorites in the Episcopal tradition, usually sung on All Saints Day. It concludes with the line, “For the saints of God are just folk like me / And I mean to be one, too.” It’s a reminder of the people in our lives—living and otherwise—who are everyday saints, not canonized but important in our formation.

In Dick Johnson Is Dead, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson celebrates her father, one such everyday saint. Dick isn’t actually dead, but he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. How much of his life remains isn’t certain, but Johnson is determined to show him just how well he’s loved by trying to rid him of some of his fear of death.

Johnson does this in a darkly funny way that’s true to her dad’s mischievous streak: She collaborates with him on a series of staged scenes depicting his death from a variety of accidents. Dick is crushed by an air conditioner, falls down stairs, is hit by a construction worker’s nail-filled board, and more. “Everyone dies,” Johnson reminds us, even the people we love the most.

RIAN JOHNSON'S FILM Knives Out wastes no time setting up the murder mystery that powers its plot. In the very first scene, famed mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found in the library of his mansion, his throat cut. Harlan’s family is shocked. His Latina caretaker, Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s closest confidant, is devastated. The police think it’s a suicide. Private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) thinks otherwise.

The mystery of Harlan’s death may be the plot of Knives Out, but as the story progresses, it’s clear that the film is actually about something else.

Bootstrapping—the idea that one can achieve success purely through hard work and determination—is touted in most areas of public life, from business to education to politics. White Americans particularly love to claim that we’ve risen from tough circumstances while making it harder for less-advantaged populations to do just that.

In Knives Out, the bootstrapping myth is everywhere. Harlan’s children are proud that their dad built a publishing empire. Harlan’s daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis) tells Blanc that she, too, created her own business from the ground up. But, of course, those stories aren’t the whole truth. Linda would be nowhere without the hefty loan she got from her father. Harlan himself may have worked hard for his success, but as a white man, there’s no doubt his path was easier than it would have been for others.

“I love the truth I find in dark films.”

In a 2003 speech titled “A Filmmaker’s Progress,” Sinister and Doctor Strange filmmaker Scott Derrickson, a Christian, made this statement in reference to spiritual and moral themes in his work. It’s an interesting idea to consider, not only because tales of terror get more popular this time of year, but also because Derrickson does most of his work in horror, a genre that doesn’t often get positive associations with faith.

Horror is typically considered exploitative, good for nothing more than the basest forms of gratuitousness that cinema can offer. But in fact horror is a smarter, more diverse genre than it’s given credit for. It is one of the best cinematic vehicles for social commentary.

WHEN I STARTED writing this column a decade ago, the Oscars were about to address The Dark Knight not being nominated for Best Picture by expanding from five to 10 possible nominees. Only two Marvel Universe movies had been released, iPads didn’t exist, movies were still mostly shot on film, and #MeToo wasn’t known outside activist circles.

Today, as I write my final regular column for the magazine, the expanded nominations system has delivered one of the least plausible Best Picture awards in memory (Green Book), 22 Marvel movies have been released, people make films on iPads, watching cinema on a phone is second nature, and a new era of respect and accountability is dawning in the entertainment industry and elsewhere.

THERE ARE moments in The King—Eugene Jarecki’s ambitious movie about how the rise and decline of Elvis Presley is a metaphor for America—when the film feels like a prophetic lament. Striking widescreen photography frames an original idea: taking the Rolls Royce that Elvis owned on a nationwide road trip, picking up hitchhikers and celebrities alike to talk about what went wrong.

Parts of it are brilliant: Chuck D lamenting how Elvis appropriated black music and ended up being coronated while “Big Mama” Thornton (for whom Leiber and Stoller wrote “Hound Dog”) remained a marginal figure; John Hiatt gently weeping in the back of the Rolls, his heart heavy at how Elvis “was so trapped”; the housekeeper who found Elvis half-dead on the toilet, and the women who live in one of his early homes, briefly centering the stark contrast between a 20th-century king and 21st-century poverty.

It’s brave and imaginative to include footage of Jarecki’s interviewees criticizing him and the film itself. The Wire creator David Simon says it would have been better to use one of Elvis’ Cadillacs—a more apt metaphor for American decline than the car of a British aristocrat. More challenging is Van Jones asking why Jarecki seems to defend a man who took the music of descendants of enslaved people, accrued enormous power for himself, and didn’t speak up when the nation needed public figures to support civil rights.

BEFORE WE GET to the best movies of 2018, let’s talk about the most memorable moments of this year in cinema. Neil Armstrong casting his daughter’s bracelet into a canyon on the moon in First Man, a story as much about one person’s grief and desire to connect with another as about our species’ ambition and desire to conquer the final frontier.

The dawning realization, in What They Had, of why Robert Forster steps out of the bedroom he has shared with Blythe Danner for 60 years, sparing her more suffering and loving her until the end.

A deceptively simple scene—a conversation in a car going from one neighborhood to another—that’s a revelation of social inequality and how near yet far we live from each other. In minutes, Widows covers centuries of relationships of power.

An unexpected funeral in The Gospel of Eureka that breaks the audience’s heart and calls forth our loves.

And the titular character Christopher Robin, who holds Pooh Bear’s hand as they walk through a field, as though Terrence Malick is directing the film.

IN THE FILM BLAZE, directed by actor Ethan Hawke, happiness is rare and meaning always seems slightly out of reach, just around the corner. An unconventional, compelling biopic of Blaze Foley, a country musician who died too young, and violently, Blaze is a challenging alternative to familiar rags-to-riches tales. It’s rags-to-slightly-more-fashionable-rags, where the loneliness of the road is never salved by the acclaim of a crowd, the price of art being the very life of the artist.

As a movie about the pain of making music, it’s up there with Tender Mercies, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and Dreamgirls. As a biopic it gets closer to the inner life of its subject than most—Ben Dickey’s hypnotic lead performance embodies the drive to write, to sing, to perform, even if no one’s watching. “He knew the value of zero,” says iconic songwriter Townes van Zandt in the film. Van Zandt is played by Charlie Sexton, one of van Zandt’s cultural heirs and a frequent member of Bob Dylan’s band. The value of zero here is the notion that what we’re most called to in life is authenticity, whatever the reward.

THERE’S A bluish light on the beach in The Piano, Jane Campion’s 1993 film about a woman mute by trauma-induced choice, sold from Scotland into an unwanted marriage in New Zealand, who deepens the roots of her soul and expands her reach into the air and the people around her. The same light is in the misty forest where her confused patron and eventual lover lives; but in her husband’s home, it is dark.

I remembered The Piano as an unusual Victorian romance, but watching it recently, in a restored version that accentuates the exquisite strangeness of its images and ideas, opened a forgotten room in my mind. The Piano functions as a love story that could happen “here”—a character liberates herself from oppression, claims her space in the world, and learns to love herself. But it also deals with mythic reality. Love, hate, power, healing, purpose, Being itself. Things I had not noticed the first time.

It’s often this way when we watch films from the past—we remember who we were, which of course is only ever who we thought ourselves to be; we compare with who we think ourselves to be now. A dialogue ensues between the younger and older selves. A movie that we then experienced as a masterpiece now seems clichéd, or one we did not “get” the first time around now manifests as the film we’ve been waiting for all our lives. We weren’t ready before. Sometimes what we need most is to be reminded that the wonder we used to experience might be even more true than the skepticism that now burdens us.