Just a Paul Schrader kind of week, I guess.
Movies
It's impressive that even after 45 years of making these "lonely man" movies (and however many years before that that Robert Bresson was making the movies that inspired them), Paul Schrader is still finding new corners to explore in the format. The tropes are all here in The Card Counter, right down to specific scenes: the late-night journal-writing with a dark glass of booze, the date with the would-be redemptive woman who doesn't realize how in-over-her-head she is with the protagonist, the finale of morally ambiguous, religiously freighted violence (of course), etc. But even so, it doesn't feel like Schrader is repeating himself so much as he is meaningfully iterating, finding new life within the rhythms—the protagonist of The Card Counter himself talks about this with his endless parade of poker games in identically anonymous conference rooms across America, stating with a sort of zen calm about the peace that such loops bring in life. As always, though, there's not a lot of peace beneath the surface, though. This time, the demons wrestling within "lonely man" are his past as a torturer at Abu Ghraib and that fact that he and other rank-and-file soldiers took the fall while the architects of the war crimes went on to become respected consultants. It has to be said that one of the "new" things that Schrader finds in this version of his lonely man films is not just new to his career but to American movies in general: unless I'm missing something, this is one of the first (if not the first) American feature films that confronts the monstrosity of America's War on Terror head-on as an absolute evil of which we as a country need to atone, and at a moment in which George W. Bush has rehabilitated his image into a respectable Never-Trump Republican and the war in Afghanistan gets revised into a nobly tragic story of the United States military temporarily saving a country from extremists, The Card Counter feels like it's genuinely at the bleeding edge in terms of mainstream-ish films. There's also some cool new stuff in terms of style as Schrader continues to lean into more overtly transcendental style like he did in First Reformed—a sequence involving a park lit up with thousands of Christmas lights feels meditative in a way that it's hard to imagine the Schrader who wrote Taxi Driver or Hardcore leaning into. At the same time, I don't know if I'm quite ready to embrace this as one of his high-water marks, as interesting as the individual pieces are. For starters, the cast is pretty weak: Oscar Isaac is good enough, though he's hardly an Ethan Hawke or a Robert De Niro, but Tye Sheridan and especially Tiffany Haddish feel really out of their depth in finding life in Schraders as-always somewhat stilted dialogue. And on a more structural level, I'm not exactly sure what the ending is going for or if it even works: the decision to put the climactic violence off-screen feels tasteful in a way that doesn't quite square with the explicit extreme violence depicted in the Abu Ghraib flashbacks, and thematically, Schrader is going to the Bresson / Crime and Punishment redemptive well in a way that feels a little half-baked this time around. There's enough here to make this movie worth watching (and I haven't even talked about the hilarious kitsch of the poker games, which is perfectly evoked ["U-S-A! U-S-A!"]). But I wish it landed the whole endeavor a little better. Grade: B
There's something vaguely "off" about Zola that I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's just the fundamental sloppiness of a movie like this, where in-the-moment thrills are prioritized over a movie having good bones to hang those thrills (like, what on earth is the point of the one-off dramatization of the reddit thread written by Stefani?); or maybe it's just that I find the breathless linguistic style of a Twitter thread (one of which this movie is apparently based on) just a little irritating. I dunno what it is. But outside of that slightly unsatisfying feeling, I thought this was really captivating. The style of the movie—kind of Sofia Coppola filtered through the visual and aural cues of iOS and social media—is capable of some absolutely stunning imagery, and specifically a type of imagery I don't think I've seen in a movie before, and the cast is top-to-bottom great, especially the central duo of Taylour Paige and Riley Keough. I don't think I'm quite tuned-in enough to the social media world this film depicts to know if its thesis on the intersection of race, sex work, exploitation, and the attention economy holds water, but it at least has the feel of something insightful, and whether or not it is just prioritizing in-the-moment thrills over solid construction, it at least does have some solid in-the-moment thrills. Grade: B
Not nearly as cool or interesting or radical as Phoenix or Transit, but Undine still has some neat things going on. The connection between the GDR and the undine myth is good, but honestly, I would have liked the movie a lot better if it consisted just of the museum lectures about the urban design of East Berlin. Grade: B
Probably the most Paul Schrader premise of all time (a midwestern Calvinist finds out that his daughter has gotten wrapped up in the adult film industry, so he decides to head to California to get her/give God's judgement to all those involved). There are some really astute threads here: for starters, the way that the exceptionally by-the-book five-point Calvinism of George C. Scott's character makes him fundamentally incapable of compassion toward those trapped in the very depravity from which he hopes to liberate his daughter (why bother with compassion when God has it all worked out, right?), and then how this maps so well onto the then-nascent Religious Right/Moral Majority, whose horror at America's so-called slide into depravity is only matched by their contempt for the people in that world who need material help. In fact, the whole "daughter runs away and gets into pornography" was practically a Moral Majority meme, one that I heard a lot growing up and was almost always used as a backdoor into reactionary, anti-liberation politics, and the idea of having this square-jawed, devout Calvinist basically re-enact that true fantasy of the Religious Right (which has always been more interested in punishment than redemption—because again, when you're just a cog in "God's plan," why bother with compassion?) is a really great encapsulation of how the theology of right-wing Christianity has allowed for it to go through some truly terrifying "ends justify the means" deals over the years, even taking at face value that their stated beliefs and values are sincerely and not even the slightest bit hypocritically held, which few movies grant religious conservatives but which of course Paul Schrader knows better than to second-guess. I just wish the movie itself was better. There's so much of this movie that's almost really good without ever quite getting there. George C. Scott's performance is good, but he just doesn't quite have the sociopathic duality of devout belief and frightening indifference that the role truly calls for; the writing flirts with the kind of ambiguous subjectivity that makes Taxi Driver such a live wire, but never fully commits to it; the cinematography has some inspired flourishes that hint at but not quite deliver a movie that rises above a pedestrian realism. It's hard not to be frustrated with a movie that could have been great being merely good. So much interesting stuff going on here, though. Grade: B
At 192 minutes instead of 773 minutes, Céline and Julie Go Boating doesn't have quite as much time to test its audience's patience as Out 1, Jacques Rivette's other early-'70s metaphysical epic. But it still does test patience at times. It takes a looong time for the true nature of the plot to reveal itself, and even once it does become clear what the story is (basically, two women find out that they can slip in and out of an alternate universe), the alternate universe itself just isn't interesting enough to prevent me from becoming restless as we watch long sequences of its Henry-James-inspired melodrama. I feel confident in being a Philistine about that here because Céline and Julie themselves decide that it's boring, too, and what they decide to do once they declare it boring is one of the most magical things about this movie, which I won't spoil. Like Out 1, this movie rewards those who stick it out, as the final forty-five minutes or so of the movie are absolutely intoxicating, but unlike Out 1, even at its most patience-testing, Céline and Julie Go Boating always has Céline and Julie for audiences to fall back on: two of the most winsome screen presences of all time. However slow the movie got, I never felt frustrated, because it was always fun to just watch these two characters just exist with each other, and once you get to the part of the movie where they actually start becoming active agents in the story, the movie becomes a great time. All the otherworldliness of later metaphysical arthouse classics like Mulholland Drive, but with twice the charm. Grade: B+
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