Reviews
Call Me by Your Name (2017)
An intersectional triumph!!! A victory for narcissistic hedonism!!!
I know: the filmmakers were adapting a book and couldn't depart from its core. But you and I can have a thought experiment with two alternate plots, can't we? Here goes.
Alternate plot #1: In northern Italy in the 1980s, seventeen-year old Elia begins a relationship with Oliver, her art professor father's twenty-four year old cis-gender research assistant for the summer, with whom she bonds over her budding sexuality, their shared Jewish identity, and the charming north Italian landscape. At first Oliver is reluctant to respond to Elia's approaches but, as the age of consent in Italy is fourteen (because Juliet Capulet), he yields, to their mutual satisfaction. After their first sex, when Oliver is away, Elia, overcome with desire for Oliver, satisfies her passion with a zucchini from her family's kitchen garden (a motif borrowed from the "Therèse Philosophe" scene in the 1973 masterpiece Immoral Tales), beautifully illustrating how natural and wholesome their love is. Later, at her progressive sorta-Jewish parents' positive urging, Elia and Oliver travel together to Bergamo, get drunk, have lots of sex, and run around under gushing waterfalls calling each other by their own names, a courageous experiment in transexuality. Six months later, after Oliver has returned to the U. S. and Elia has had an abortion, Elia's mother consoles her tearful daughter with wise words about the summertime sex romp as something "very special."
Alternate plot #2: In northern Italy in the 1980s, seventeen-year old Elio feels sexually attracted to Oliver, his art professor father's twenty-four year old bisexual research assistant for the summer, with whom he slowly forms a relationship over his budding sexuality, their shared Jewish identity, and the charming north Italian landscape. At first Oliver is strongly tempted to yield to Elio's advances, but manfully resists, explaining to Elio the reasons why it would be wrong for them to have sex together: their obvious age difference (despite the fact that the age of consent in Italy is fourteen); the betrayal of Elio's parents' trust; the moral confusion that might be caused to a still-developing young man; and the deep emotional damage caused by reducing sex to meaningless and casual hedonistic gratification. They travel together to Bergamo, where Oliver teaches Elio about Greek and Roman sculpture and they form a lasting friendship worthy of the name. Years later they meet in New York, each married with children and happy lives. They look each other square in the eye and share a firm handshake. Elio thanks Oliver for his moral courage and self-control all those years ago.
The woke film industry just cannot help itself from nagging and lecturing us about how hip homosexuality is and how most of us are bigoted clodhoppers for not getting their message no matter how often they send it. Well, this message is pretty clear. Did you miss the allusions to the Greek myth of Narcissus, what with all the ponds and swimming pools, not to mention the silly "call my by your name" thing? Elio: "I love you, Elio!!" Oliver: "I love you, Oliver!" In another scene Oliver is reviewing images of classical Greek sculpture with his professor host and all he has to say about the Charioteer of Delphi is "So sensual," as if the viewer's hard-on is the true test of an immortal artwork's beauty.
If you value your time on this earth, do not waste two and a half precious hours in the theater enduring this thing.
20th Century Women (2016)
Sensitive New Age Guy Films Feminist Critique of Feminism. Or something.
In late '70s San Bernardino, a Greatest Generation protofeminist, now a chain- smoking middle-aged long-divorced single mom with authority issues, Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening) is losing control of her fifteen-year old skate punk son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). They inhabit her creaking Victorian manse which is under continual remodeling (Symbol Alert!). To make ends meet, Dorothea rents rooms to Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a brooding twenty-something hipster and recent cancer survivor, and William (Billy Crudup), a handyman, mechanic, and New Age seeker who can't accept the end of hippiedom and grow up. Joining this merry band is Julie (Ellie Fanning), a lonely pouting brat two years older than Jamie who hates her family (natch), sleeps around (a lot), and spends most of her free daytime hanging out at Dorothea's house and her nights in Jamie's bed (it's not what you think!).
Free spirits, let us call them all.
The tension comes from Jamie's emerging but directionless young manhood. Dorothea is a loving but incompetent parent, and the father has long since abandoned the boy. But at least she gets it that Jamie now needs more guidance than she can give him. William is too much a loser to be of any help, so she enlists Abbie and Julie to serve as Jamie's mentors (mentrices?). Julie asks the film's core question: "Don't you need a man to raise a man?" To which Dorothea (beating Murphy Brown by twelve fictional years) replies, of course, "No, I don't think you do." Well, let's see how that works out.
Abbie introduces Jamie to the fading punk scene and to feminist literature dealing mostly with female sexual satisfaction. The result is a lot of pointless anger, noise as music, and Jamie's growing obsession with — oops, I meant "awareness of" women's genital fixtures. To help him further along this path, Julie steals Dorothea's car, she and Jamie rent a motel room and, oh, you'll just have to see for yourself, won't you?
In weird first-person epilogues, the main characters all tell you how their lives will turn out ten or twenty years hence. Happy, married, and with children, mostly. The takeaway seems to be fundamentally conservative yet with more than a mere nod to feminism: traditional (the now-requisite adjective) marriage and family are the norm to which we snap back, even after periods and episodes of error and oddball experiment; yet feminism has taken some of the starch out of that stiff standard. And yes, because of it a young man becomes a better man, the "sensitive man" of certain feminist plans (see Mansfield, Harvey C., Manliness [2007]). Or maybe it's just that a parent's love makes up for most parental failings. With a little help from our friends.
And the house? Like Humphrey Bogart (a running allusion), it belongs to another, more self-certain age, an age Dorothea is trying to restore, if only in its outward forms, while her life itself is being rehabbed by the social, sexual, technological, and political constructions of the times.
Is it a comedy, really? Nah. More of a "sweet lost mood" pic in homage to the director's mom. The acting is completely convincing, though, so much so that you find yourself coughing and swatting the cigarette smoke away. Worth seeing, but without lasting effects.
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
A modern curse tragedy.
Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford's film adaptation of Austin Wright's novel Tony and Susan, is a curse tale, a story of vengeful justice, its three overlapping plots each presented in disjointed narrative style. In the present-time shell plot, Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), married to handsome alpha specimen Hutton (Armie Hammer), is the principal of a glossy Los Angeles art gallery. Their superficiality is ably demonstrated by a Jeff Koons Balloon Dog on the grounds of their fabulous home high above the glittering city. But their life is on the precipice of ruin, their marriage accursed, as meaningless as her so-called art. Hutton is having an affair and is going broke, Susan medicates herself for emptiness, pain, and insomnia.
She returns home late one night from a gala showing of Venus of Willendorf burlesque dancers, both in gigantic video and as grotesque odalisques. She drives through the slick metal gate of their estate. After it closes we see a black Mercedes pull up to the gate and stop. The next morning a package arrives for her containing a manuscript, a novel written by her loser English teacher first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom she had left twenty years earlier for Hutton. He has titled the work after a teasing nickname he once gave Susan, "nocturnal animal," and has dedicated it to her. And he has added a personal note: Would she like to meet? he will soon be in LA. In bed at night, in her husband's adulterous absence, Susan begins to read the novel. Now begins the slow deliverance of justice.
Edward's book, the story-within-a-story second plot, is in the tradition of Cape Fear, Straw Dogs, Death Wish, and, at least in terrain and tone, No Country for Old Men. Mild-mannered Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal in a double role), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and their bratty teen-aged daughter India (Ellie Bamber) pack up their Mercedes sedan for a long night-time road trip across West Texas. They are a happy family, teasing and affectionate, the kind of family Edward and Susan might have had. But on a dark and desolate two-lane they are terrorized by three evildoers who run them off the road, humiliate Tony, abduct Laura and India in his own car, and dump him far out on the desert. In this horrific scene and its consequences we witness Tony's failure of manliness. This of course must be resolved. Justice must be realized.
This point links us to the third plot, the past. Obsessively reading Edward's manuscript arouses Susan's deepest guilt. Through flashbacks of their courtship and short-lived marriage we see her troubling memories. Susan was at first drawn to his romanticism and sensitivity. Her harridan mother (Laura Linney) mocks these very qualities, exhorting Susan to be a realist, predicting that if she marries Edward she will before long hate what she now most admires in him. Sure enough, daughter soon becomes her mother, criticizing his writing, berating his deficiencies, declaring herself now a realist, too, who demands more from life. Edward gets it: like her mother, she thinks he's weak.
We glimpse a flirtation with Hutton, then watch the painful breakup. The abandonment of her marriage, the whiff of adultery, are bad enough. But the original sin, the moral pollution, is Susan's abortion of her and Edward's child, of which he is ignorant. Her gay brother Cooper (Neil Jackson) has engineered this evil. In his car outside the clinic, the rain-spattered windshield reflecting Susan's lamentation, she wails "What have I done? I will really regret this someday." Truer than she can even imagine. In one searing tragic instant Susan tells Cooper that he always knows the right thing to do and commits her trust to him. He promises her that Edward will never find out. But we suspect his motive. And Edward does know.
As she reads, obsessively, Susan finally understands Edward's real strength, ability, and yes, his realism. Drawn to him now, she arranges a dinner meeting while her husband is across the country in a hotel with a lover. Does she seek to end her curse by reunion? To ask forgiveness and heal her hurt, to fill the hollowness of her life? But she doesn't understand until the final scene that Edward has seduced her by his fiction. Teasing her with the promise of a liaison, he has forced her to confront her infidelity, her weakness. She has been the one feeding on airy fantasies. She is now as achingly alone as he is. The final scene of the novel forces her and us into grim thoughts about the state of Edward's life.
As curse tragedy, Nocturnal Animals is pretty damned good. Here are decent people who make terrible mistakes. We pity but cannot help them. Whether or not it is a commentary on marriage, divorce, abortion, and family, I leave to others to say. But the tight control of such a complex of plots is evident throughout. Subtle recurrent motifs stitch the three stories together. Odalisques -- ugly, macabre, or beautiful -- have been mentioned. Watch for red sofas. Baths, showers, and rain tell of vain attempts to wash what can't be cleaned.