Movies
The Coen Brothers doing a western anthology film fills a lot of holes in my heart I didn't realize I had. Being an anthology film, it has its ups and downs, of course, but even the downs aren't so much "down" as they are just inevitably not as good as the film's first and best segment, the utterly delightful and demented musical sequence starring Tim Blake Nelson from which the film gets its title. Elsewhere, we have the Coens as naturalists, adapting a Jack London story with a grizzled Tom Waits (is there any other kind?) in the lead role as a gold prospector, the Coens as existentialists (by way of Sergio Leone) in the nearly wordless James-Franco-as-fate-addled-outlaw segment, and the Coens in full-on mythical mode in the final segment, which brings the film's far-flung fascination with death into a culminating carriage ride into literal hell. In this way, it's sort of in the same vein as Hail, Caesar!, an experiment in bringing all their various genre proclivities under one roof; Buster Scruggs goes the extra mile by making the film something of a survey of the full breadth of the Coens' worldview, too, a treatise on all the various ideas that have animated their filmography from Blood Simple onward: that of absurd fate, that of the essential foolishness of humanity's pretensions of rationality, humanity's finitude, that of the crucial empathy in the face of all this. That's to say nothing of the purely aesthetic pleasures of the film: the storybook framing devices (with wax-papered "color plates"), the typically florid, hilarious Coen dialogue, the stark, vibrant digital cinematography. If nothing else, it's an extraordinarily beautiful film with a keen attention to detail. But thankfully, it is something else, and a very good something at that. Grade: A-
It's incredibly easy to chart this movie as the intersection of Nicole Holofcener, Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, and Noah Baumbach's collective careers—which, unless you are one of those people who (understandably) has an allergy to that brand of cinema comprised almost entirely of upper-middle-class white New Yorkers walking and talking and bickering, is more description than critique. As an iteration of that genre, Private Life is minutely observed and acutely felt. The central struggle of a couple who are struggling to conceive feels lived-in to an extent that fertility plots rarely are in media—lived-in to the point of chaffing, an at-once breezy dramedy hinged on verbal quips and a bracing domestic struggle that rubs you raw with its slowly dawning but deeply insistent sense of tragedy. I know I compared this film to Baumbach et al a second ago, but the extent to which this film wears its heart on its sleeve and to which that heart is lacerated feels entirely its own, and it's great. Grade: A-
That this is sort of a stealth playtest for Disney's reprehensible new thing of doing heavily CGI'd "live-action" remakes of their animated properties is just icing on the whole nasty cake of this movie. I suppose I should give the movie credit for at least trying something new with the original story, given that I tend to like revisionist fairy tales. But it's just so lousily put together. The CG is trash, and, more importantly, the revisionist elements feel entirely haphazard, as if they never got past the pitch stage—what if Maleficent's arc is a rape-revenge story? What if we dealt with the whole icky thing of Aurora's "true love" being some rando she met in the woods twelve hours prior? What if fairies and humans are at war, and the humans are the bad guys, because COLONIALISM? What if Maleficent's arc was about surrogate motherhood? Wait, didn't we already have an arc for Maleficent's character? I can't remember, just go with it—hey, I have an idea: what if Maleficent is a scorned lover and is taking revenge on the king? What if they have a cage match at the end of the movie? Is this too much to put into a 97-minute cash-in on one of Disney's most revered properties? What if none of this fits together? Do you think our CG is good enough to stitch it all together in post? Grade: C-
It's easy to dismiss this film as an exercise in cinematic sadism, and to be clear, it's not not an exercise in cinematic sadism—to watch this film is to be "treated" to 95 minutes of virtually uninterrupted tragedy, often of the most happenstancial kind, human society being cruel for the sake of cruelty. But the specific way that Bresson frames this misery feels subversively profound, too. The choice to make so many of the film's incidents perverse inversions of Biblical narratives is deeply rattling: Balaam's donkey, beaten but denied human speech; the Virgin Mary raped and abandoned. It calls attention to just how much of the Bible's depiction of the Divine is aspirational—how much of a grace note it is for God to intervene on the behalf of the oppressed and how often that feels far divorced from a world in which oppression marches forward unimpeded, not only undeterred by our parochial society raised on the Biblical narratives but in fact spurred on by it. Society, undergirded by our collective Christian morality selectively applied, is both cruel and a fount of misprioritized empathy. Balthazar the Donkey is an expressionless, perfectly blank vehicle for empathy, upon which it is easy for us audience members to wish Christian charity as we see him mistreated time and time again. But human beings: these are not tabula rasa targets for our empathy; they are dirty and grating and weak, and we hate them. This is the film's strongest indictment, evoking one of the most crucial Bible stories of them all: the often-overlooked ending of the Book of Jonah, in which Jonah mourns the death of the vine under which he found shade, while at the same time wishing for the entire city of Nineveh to be destroyed. It's the crux of the film's moral spine: we care about this donkey, for which we neither worked for nor helped grow—should we not care for our own teeming mass of humanity, who cannot tell their right from their left? Grade: B+
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