Luca Guadagnino‘s Call My By Your Name was the big winner in today’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards, taking the Best Picture trophy, splitting the Best Director trophy between Guadagnino and The Shape of Water‘s Guillermo del Toro, and with Timothee Chalamet taking the Best Actor prize. On top of which The Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe won LAFCA’s Best Supporting Actor prize, and Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf won the Best Supporting Actress trophy.
Call Me By Your Name has now won two Best Picture trophies (LAFCA, Gotham Awards), and is likely to win the same trophy from the 2018 Spirit Awards, which has nominated Guadagnino’s film for six awards. Chalamet has won Best Actor from both LAFCA and the New York Film Critics Circle, plus a Breakthrough Actor award from the Gothams. Dafoe seems all but unstoppable with Supporting Actor trophies from LAFCA, NYFCC and the National Board of Review. Metcalf has taken the Best Supporting Actress awards from LAFCA and the National Board Of Review.
Earlier: I was talking to a friend last night about this morning’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association voting, and he went “Yeah, well.” What, you don’t think they’re influential or at least interesting? “I don’t know that anyone cares all that much,” he replied. “They always seem to go with off-the-wall picks. We’ll see.”
Talk about flaky — the LAFCA website has a LATEST NEWS crawl on the top, and one of the headlines says “LAFCA names Moonlight as Best Film of 2016.”
10:57 am: They’re voting right now, the bagel-and-cream cheese-and-onions gang, and the first winner is…
11:13 am: Best Cinematography: Dan Laustsen, The Shape of Water. (Runner-up: Roger Deakins, Blade Runner 2049.) HE comment: What about Dunkirk‘s Hoyte von Hoytema?
11:25 am: Best Music/Score: Johnny Greenwood, Phantom Thread. (Runner-up: Alexandre Desplat, The Shape of Water.) HE comment: 1st runner-up support for Desplat plus dp Dan Lausten‘s win obviously suggests strong current for The Shape of Water. Will Guillermo’s erotic-aquatic fable take the Best Picture prize?
11:40 am: Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe‘s harried, exasperated but altogether decent motel manager in Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project. Runner-up: Sam Rockwell‘s effed-up deputy sheriff in in Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri. HE comment: Okay, fine.
11:51 am: Best Production Design: Blade Runner 2049‘s Dennis Gassner. Runner-up: The Shape Of Water‘s Paul D. Austerberry. Excerpt from my BR49 review: “Deakins has done his usual first-rate job here and everyone knows he’s well past due, but the real whoa-level work is by production designer Dennis Gassner and supervising art director Paul Inglis.” HE comment: Another Shape of Water runner-up vote! Clearly there’s a hardcore contingent that will vote for Shape of Water in any category, come hell or high water.
12:01 pm: Best Editing award goes to Dunkirk‘s Lee Smith. Runner-up: I, Tonya‘s Tatiana S. Riegel.
12:06 pm: Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf win LAFCA’s Best Supporting Actress award. Runner-up: Mudbound‘s Mary J. Blige.
12:17 pm: Winner of LAFCA’s Documentary/Nonfiction award is Agnes Varda and JR’s Faces Places. Runner-up: Brent Morgen‘s Jane, a doc about chimpanzeetarian Jane Goodall, which had its big L.A. premiere at the Hollywood Bowl.
[Brunch break] [HE nap break]
2:09 pm: For LAFCA’s Foreign Language Film award, a tie between Robin Campillo‘s BPM (Beats per Minute) and Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s utterly brilliant Loveless. LAFCA’s animated feature award went to The Breadwinner and not Disney’s Coco. The Best Screenplay award was won by Jordan Peele‘s Get Out. Runner-up: Martin McDonagh‘s screenplay for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.
3:15 pm: LAFCA’s Best Picture of 2017 is Luca Guadagnino‘s Call me By Your Name — all is forgiven, no more bagel and cream cheese jokes until next year. Runner-up: The Florida Project. The Best Director Award is a tie between CMBYN‘s Luca Guadagnino and The Shape of Water‘s Guillermo del Toro. Best Actor is CMBYN‘s Timothee Chalamet (runner-up: James Franco, The Disaster Artist). The Best Actress award has gone to The Shape of Water‘s Sally Hawkins
Earlier: If I was there voting with Bob Strauss, Myron Meisel, John Powers and the rest of them, I would toast my bagel just so, going for a nice light brown color. Then I’d add a schmear of Philadelphia 1/3 Less Fat Cream Cheese, a few slim rings of red onion, a thin slice of lox, some diced Roman tomatoes.
HE favorite Call Me By Your Name has scored six 2017 Spirit Award nominations, compared to five for Get Out and Good Time and four for Lady Bird and The Rider. If you know anything about Spirit Award-voting tendencies, the six noms — Best Feature, Best Director (Luca Guadagnino), Best Editing (Walter Fasano), Best Male Lead (Timothee Chalamet), Best Supporting Male (Armie Hammer) and Best Cinematography (Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) — make CMBYN (a) an odds-on favorite to take the Best Feature Spirit trophy and (b) locks it down as a major Oscar nomination threat on these fronts, particularly Best Picture.
Over the last three years, the Spirit Award Best Feature prize and the Best Picture Oscar have been won by the same film — Moonlight, Spotlight and Birdman. It’s happened, in fact, in five out of the past six years, starting with 2011’s The Artist. The Spirits didn’t go for Argo in 2012, but they went for 12 Years a Slave in ’13 followed by Birdman, Spotlight and Moonlight.
All of those Gurus and Gold Derby group-thinkers who’ve been listing Call Me By Your Name in sixth or seventh place on their roster of most likely Best Pic contenders are now twirling around and saying to themselves, “Uh-oh…hamma hamma hamma…I’d better recalculate my predictions and upgrade Luca’s film to at least second or third place or people will think I’m out of step with the culture!” Trust me, they are literally muttering this to themselves right now.
I’ve been saying that while 2016 Best Picture Oscar for Moonlight was largely about making up for “Oscars So White”, 2017 is, performance-wise and possibly otherwise, about the Year of the Ballsy, Go-For-It Independent Woman — Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan‘s Lady Bird triumph, Meryl Streep‘s Katharine Graham performance in The Post, Frances McDormand‘s lead perf in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Sally Hawkins as a fantasy-driven cleaning woman in The Shape of Water, Margot Robbie in I, Tonya.
And I mean especially in the current climate of women pushing back everywhere against workplace sexual harassment. It all fits together.
This told me that the most likely recipient of this cultural moment might be Lady Bird, and by that I mean guaranteed Oscar noms for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress and so on. That still seems likely, but before this morning I was half-presuming that Lady Bird might take more Spirit Award noms that any other film. But that hasn’t happened. Lady Bird has been nominated for Best Feature, Best Screenplay (Gerwig), Best Actress (Ronan) and one other.
Hollywood Elsewhere + Tatyana Antropova attended last night’s big AFI Film Fest screening at the TCL Chinese, and then the big after-party at the Hollywood Roosevelt. It was my third viewing, and it didn’t diminish in the slightest. This film is full of little rivulets and off-angles and cross-corner pocket drops. I easily could see it another couple of times. It’s a perfectly realized thing, nothing off or miscalculated. The term is “masterpiece.”
Tone-deaf predictions and sluggish attitudes from certain quarters aside, CMBYNhas to be Best Picture-nominated. At least that. The Movie Godz would be appalled if the Academy elbows it aside.
And the following paragraph from an 11.11 piece by TheWrap‘s Mikey Glazer is, no offense, almost surreal in its disconnect from reality: “While Brokeback via Lombardia may not normally raise eyebrows, in the current climate of hourly explosive revelations of sexual harassment and assault across the entertainment industry, any tenor of impropriety in a physical relationship made this all the more sensitive.”
“Impropriety”? There isn’t a whiff of the stuff in Call Me By Your Name, and that’s all that should matter to anyone. There’s no emotional indifference or bruising in this film. No cruelty, exploitation, selfishness. Okay, a young girl gets her feelings hurt but quickly recovers. This is simply an elegant love story that unfolds at its own leisurely pace, and in a way that touches everyone.
Elio, the precocious 17 year-old played by Timothee Chalamet (who actually turns 22 next month), falls in love with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a studious, somewhat glib guy in the mid 20s, and they seem more or less on an equal footing. It hurts when love slips away, of course, but people of all ages have felt this over the centuries, and Elio’s parents are with Elio on his emotional journey every step of the way.
Posted on 6.4.17: “Call Me By Your Name is, yes, a first-love film, an early ’80s gay romance and a sensual, laid-back Italian summer dreamscape. But it connects in a more fundamental way with family values, which is to say father-son values, extended-family values, community values…we’re all together in this.
Now I’ve spoken to a savvy, somewhat older industry guy who gets around, and he’s offered to bet me any amount that CMBYN won’t be Best Picture nominated. He said “it really didn’t work for me”, and he knows a couple of other guys from his age-peer group (including a film festival honcho) who feel the same way. Dismissive, shaking their heads, nope.
Among this fellow’s observations: (a) Luca is unquestionably a skillful director, and the film is “very well made” and the locations are dreamy and beautiful, but (b) it’s “way too long” because he “looked at [his] watch four times”, (c) he “just didn’t buy the attraction between Armie Hammer and Timothy Chalamet,” partly because Chalamet was “too into” a local teenage girl and because Hammer was too aloof and uninterested for too long, and (d) he saw it as somewhat analogous to Robert Mulligan‘s Summer of ’42 with Armie in the Jennifer O’Neil role and Chalamet as Gary Grimes, but that he prefers Summer of ’42.
He said that the older crowd is going to have difficulty with some of the sexual intimacy scenes. When I replied “but Luca doesn’t really show anything…it’s mostly just a lot of kissing along with a simulated [sex act],” he said “the young guy takes the older guy’s underwear and puts it over his head and smells it? This is a perfect Outfest movie.”
He also said he wasn’t all that impressed by Michael Stuhlbarg‘s father-son moment with Chalamet at the end, partly because “[Stuhlbarg] says he’s never had that kind of passionate episode in his own past, the kind that Timothy has just had, and so right away Stuhlbarg is kind of pissing on his relationship with his wife, which seems pretty healthy.”
Bottom line: “Either you buy into a movie like this or you don’t,” he said. And he didn’t. And there you have it. I cover the waterfront, and it takes all sorts.
During Sunday’s sublime outdoor lunch at La Lampara, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino mentioned a kind of selling point about his brilliant film, which premiered to ecstatic raves during last January’s Sundance Film Festival and which Sony Pictures Classics will open on 11.24 — about as Oscar-baity a release date as you can get.
Call Me By Your Name is, yes, a first-love film, an early ’80s gay romance and a sensual, laid-back Italian summer dreamscape. But it connects in a more fundamental way, Luca said and which I fully agree with, with family values, which is to say father-son values, extended-family values, community values…we’re all together in this.
For the film is not so much about a one-on-one relationship (although that is certainly a central thread) as much as how the hearts and minds of a small, mostly English-speaking community in northern Italy (the film was primarily shot in Guadagnino’s home town of Crema) observe, absorb, feed into, comment upon and nourish in little affecting ways the central, slow-build love story between Timothy Chalamet and Armie Hammer. You could describe the basic dynamic along the lines of “you guys are engaged in an emotional adventure but we’re also involved in a sense because we’re family and we care.”
Posted by Esquire‘s Tyler Coates on 1.26.17: “First loves are the hardest to shake, as evidenced in the film’s closing moments. Never before has a movie treated an inevitable loss with such dignity and beauty, both through a stunning monologue delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Elio’s father, and a final, several-minute-long shot of Elio’s face as he contemplates his summer romance and, surely, what it means for the future. We may know what happens next — Eliot will surely love again — but Guadagnino places the most importance on the present, an emotional limbo full of sadness and joy, grief and hope.
“It’s enough to erase all of the movies you’ve loved before, as it’s impossible not to feel seduced and broken by what Guadagnino pulls off. The film will leave you devastated, but the memory of its exuberant 130 minutes will last a lifetime.”
There’s no question that Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name (Sony Pictures Classics, 11.24), which premiered two and a half months ago at Sundance and then screened at the Berlinale, will be regarded as a major Best Picture contender once the 2017 award season begins around Labor Day.
But how aggressively will SPC push it, especially given the fact that Call Me By Your Name appears to have an excellent shot at reaping nominations in several categories. Should they perhaps consider breaking tradition by working with a major-league Oscar strategist? Seems warranted.
SPC is renowned for supporting their award-calibre films in a committed, dutiful fashion. But they’ve never gone “full Harvey” when it comes to this or that contender. They never seem to really pull out all the stops, being frugal-minded to begin with (as all good businesspersons must be) and having long ago adopted a “favored nations” philosophy — equal treatment across the board — when it comes to award-season promotions.
By this standard SPC would this year be plugging Happy End, their Michael Haneke drama that will probably debut next month in Cannes, and the sexually repressed period drama Novitiate with as much fervor as Call Me By Your Name.
But Call Me By Your Name is different. It’s a moving, brilliantly composed, once-in-a decade relationship film that has 100% and 98% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively. And it could easily become a leading contender in five or six or even more categories. Here’s one of my rave posts from last January; here’s another.
Definitely Best Picture and Best Director, a shot at some Best Actor action for young Timothy Chalumee, a Best Adapted Screenplay nom (Guadagnino, James Ivory, Walter Fasano), and WITHOUT QUESTION a Best Supporting Actor nom for Michael Stuhlbarg for that last scene alone.
Not to mention Best Cinematography, Production Design, and maybe even a Best Original Song nom for Sufjan Stevens.
Except for two irksome elements, Mariska Hargitay‘s My Mom Jayne (Max) is an emotionally affecting doc about identity — both suppressed (Mariska’s) and misunderstood (in the case of Mariska’s late mom, Jayne Mansfield) — and emotional closure by way of family ties and genetics.
It’s a little too weepy and whiney here and here. There is always an urge among modern women to turn women of the past into victims. But the doc settles in and touches bottom by the end.
In plainer terms, it’s about (a) the 61 year-old Mariska delving into who her famous blonde bombshell mom (who died in a horribly violent car crash at age 34) really was deep down, and (b) how Mariska came to discover that her biological dad wasn’t Mickey Hargitay, her putative father who was married to Mansfield between 1958 and 1964 and who raised Mariska after Mansfield’s death.
Mariska’s actual dad is a Brazilian-Italian lounge singer named Nelson Sardelli, whom Mansfield had an extra-marital affair with in mid ’63 and early ’64.
Mariska didn’t get around to facing the truth about Sardelli until the early 1990s, a year or so before she turned 30. For structural and dramatic reasons the doc holds his information back until the final 25 minutes or so.
Irksome element #1 is that as a young child Mariska (aka Maria) appeared to have been adopted, as her eyes and hair were much darker than those of her siblings. Any stranger would have taken one look at young Mariska and presumed she wasn’t from the same gene pool as her two brothers, Miklos and Zoltan, whose natural father was Mickey Hargitay; ditto her much older sister, JayneMarieMansfield, from her mom’s first marriage.
Mariska’s biological dad, the Neapolitan-featured Sardelli, was born in Brazil and is of Italian descent. Hence Mariska looked vaguely like a daughter of southern Italy or Sicily. She certainly bore no resemblance to her Hungarian body-builder caregiver “dad”, who was born in Budapest. It’s odd how this obvious biological fact was ignored or denied for as long as it was. Which just goes to show that if there’s a strong enough will, denial can be a very powerful force in people’s lives.
Irksome element #2 occurs when Mariska interviews actor Tony Cimber (born in ‘65), the son of Jayne and her third husband, Matt Cimber, a film director and promoter.
Mariska confronts Tony with stories about some ugly behavior that happened between Jayne and Matt, mostly a result of Matt’s provocation (presumably domestic violence and bruisings). She seems to be asking Tony to atone for these incidents or perhaps even accept responsibility for his father having struck Jane — a bizarre idea, to say the least. Tony says he’s not going to “own” his father’s behavior, as he doesn’t see how this could lead to anything that would heal or cleanse. Mariska’s non-verbal but emotionally readable response is one of seeming disapproval or disappointment.
HE to God: In what realm do you look at the son or daughter of an acknowledged shithead and say, “You need to face the fact that your parent was an abusive person, and so perhaps you need to apologize for this.” WHAT?
Almost everything was awful in ‘20, ‘21 and early ‘22…peak wokeism + the pandemic…thedreariestanddarkestyearsofourlives.
One of the lowest, most despairing episodes in my industry-covering life was watching the beyond-awful Union Station Soderbergh Oscars — people still shudder at this memory, an epochalevent that convinced the moviegoing public that progressive filmmakers were giving the finger to ticket-buyers …that they were committed to the guilt-tripping, misery-spreading business like never before.
But then three months later (July ‘21) along came David Lowery’s TheGreenKnight…a dank, sodden enterprise that stood up to the Soderbergh lethargy and said “hold my beer….you don’t know what a misery pit is.” And then Leos Carax’s Annette opened a month later, plunging movie culture into an even blacker realm.
Lo, a swirling devil cloud had descended, and only now can we understand that it was this four-month nightmare (April to August ‘21) that more or less slit the throat of the movie industry…that convinced Joe and Jane Popcorn that modern cinema was up to something menacing and awful and deeply insane.
Like a strange virus I had absorbed but hadn’t yet settled into my system, I could feel my latent loathing for David Lowery‘s The Green Knight early on. I didn’t watch it when it first came out because I “knew” (i.e., strongly sensed) I would hate it.
I finally streamed this fucker late last night, and I felt smothered in thick, swamp-like boredom within seconds. Drugged, oxygen-starved, submerged in medieval muck, and facing a terrible two-hour slog.
I will never forget The Green Knight, and I will never, ever watch it again. It’s an exacting, carefully crafted, “first-rate” creation by a director of serious merit, and I was moaning and writhing all through it. I can’t believe I watched the whole thing, but I toughed it out and that — in my eyes, at least — is worth serious man points.
The Green Knight is a sodden medieval dreamscape thing — a trippy, bizarre, hallucinatory quicksand movie that moves like a snail and will make you weep with frustration and perhaps even lead to pondering (not my idea but the film’s) the idea of your own decapitation.
What would I rather do, I was asking myself — watch the rest of The Green Knight or bend over and allow my head to be cut off? Both would be terrible things to endure, I reasoned, but at least decapitation would be quick and then I’d be at peace. Watching The Green Knight for 130 minutes, on the other hand…
It’s a kind of Christmas movie or, if you will, about a game of strange beheadings. Dev Patel‘s Gawain is one of the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table — a drinking, whoring fellow who sweats a lot and often smiles when spoken to and regards much of what he sees with his mouth half open.
It must be said that Gawain splashes water onto his face and hair a lot…he’s often dripping.
The film more or less begins with the Green Knight, a intimidating ghostly figure, appearing at King Arthur’s court on Christmas Day and declaring — bear with me here because this makes no sense — that anyone can cut his head off as long as the head-chopper will agree to let his own head be sliced off by the Green Knight a year later, at the Green Chapel.
What kind of blithering moron would say “okay!” to a suggestion this ridiculous?
Why is Patel, the son of British-residing Indian Hindus, playing Gawain, a medieval Englishman with the usual Anglo-Saxon characteristics? You could just as well ask why Patel was cast in the lead role in Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield (’20). Because in today’s realm it’s cooler to embrace “presentism” than to adhere to any sense of general historical reality, or at least the historical reality that filmmakers tended to prefer before anti-white wokester Stalinism became a thing. Call it subversive casting, if you want.
Everything that happens is dream-logical. None of it adds up or leads to anything else. You could claim that Lowery’s film is about character and morality and karma and facing the consequences of one’s own actions, and I would say “okay, sure…if that works for you, fine.”
There’s a talking fox. There are giant bald women seen in the misty distance. Patel’s head explodes in fire at one point…whoa.
Barry Koeghan, an Irish actor with tiny rodent eyes and a deeply annoying swollen nose, plays a scavenging asshole of some kind. Alicia Vikander plays two roles, a commoner with a Jean Seberg-in-Breathless haircut, and a married noblewoman who has sex with Gawain at one point. You’re thinking “gee, she’s bringing Patel to orgasm…am I supposed to give a shit one way or the other?”
DECAPITATION SPOILERS: There are three beheadings in The Green Knight, and a promise of a fourth. The big ugly Green Knight (played by Ralph Ineson) loses his head early on. A ghost character named Winifred (Erin Kellyman) loses hers at the midway point. Patel’s Gawain, the ostensible hero, loses his at the end. And then he wakes up and realizes he’s been dreaming, but then is asked to submit to an actual beheading…this is presented as some sort of satisfying ending.
The finale is a complete failure, a wipe-out. It’s so completely off and miscalculated that it inspires you to mutter “seriously….that‘s the ending?”
Five minutes after The Green Knight began I understood why Average Joes have generally given it poor reviews. It’s obviously a visually inventive, high-style smarthouse thing about ultra-peculiar realms, made by a director who believes in imaginative leaps of fancy and fantasy, but watching it makes you feel fucking awful.
I can’t tell you how depressed I was at the half-hour mark when I realized I had 100 minutes to go.
Film critics generally don’t acknowledge audience miserablism. For most of them visual style is 90% to 95% of the game. If a director shoots a film with a half-mad, child-like sense of indulgence with a persistent visual motif (i.e., everything in The Green Knight is either muted gray or brown or intense green)…bathing the viewer in mood and mystery and moisture (filmmakers like Lowery adore mist, fog, rain, mud, sweat, rivers, streams)…that’s it and all is well.
There are dozens of details I could get into, but I’m not going to because what’s the point?
I had read several reviews, of course, but before watching Lowery’s film I read the Wiki synopsis of the source material, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th Century epic poem. Right away I was muttering “dear God…no, please.”
I’ve been saying for years that franchise movies don’t respect the idea of really and truly meeting your maker…the inevitable, inescapable reality of existence vaporizing like that…a sudden gasp and then nothing…the spirit rising one way or another…no dodging or putting it off.
Which is precisely what big-budget bullshit movies do time and again — they dodge, delay, sidestep or otherwise ignore the grim reaper because they want to keep reaping those Joe and Jane Popcorn dollars so forget all that biological end-of-the-road stuff. Fuck finality.
The “death” of Daniel Craig‘s 007 four years ago was, of course, bullshit — a symbolic gesture for the #MeToo crowd to momentarily savor, and then forget soon after. The Ballerina return of Keanu Reeves‘ John Wick, despite having bought the farm two years ago in John Wick 4: Even More Bullshit, meant nothing one way or the other.
And it’s all basically the fault of the nihilistically-inclined John Carpenter…Carpenter of the late ’70s was the first disser and disrespecter of death, and the idea of a character (male or female, hero or villain) breathing his or her last hasn’t been the same since.
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “In movies, you can trace the trend of what we might call Death Lite back to the moment in 1978 that established the if-it-makes-money-bring-it-back paradigm: the ‘death’ of Michael Myers at the end of Halloween.
“He gets shot six times and falls off a balcony, lying on the ground, joining the ranks of half a century’s worth of movie monsters who are destroyed by the forces of good. Seconds later, though, he is gone; his body has vanished. In essence, that one moment set up the entire arbitrary nature of movie sequel culture. You can draw a direct line from the return of Michael Myers to the resurrection of John Wick, all done in the name of fan service.
“But why does it feel like all this ritual undercutting of killing is killing us? You might say: What’s so bad, really, about taking characters who are this beloved and bringing them back to life?
“In a sense, nothing. Yet the subtle cumulative effect of it has been to create the sensation that a movie no longer has a true beginning and end, that it lacks what the Greeks called the dramatic unity of action. In Old Hollywood, movies had that; in the New Hollywood of the ’70s, they had it as well. But the death-that-isn’t-really-death syndrome feeds the perception that movies are now, more and more, just a perpetual blob of time-killing, with nothing at stake.
“And that has an insidious way of sanding down the inner morality of pop culture, and maybe of our society. In fact, I’d argue that all this ‘miraculous’ resurrection has begun to raise the question: If death in the movies is no longer permanent, if it no longer means anything, then does anything mean anything?”
Last night I re-watched my Criterion Bluray of Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America, and I wish I could say I had a good time. Alas, the viewing didn’t quite work because this 1985 film is too well remembered. I knew all the dialogue before it was spoken, verbatim:
“I chose an orange tile, burnt orange”…”And by the way our hairpiece secret is off”…”I can’t hear ya”…”I heard you say that, schmucks come see Wayne Newton…I like Wayne Newton….that makes me a schmuck?”…”Santy Claus took care of everything”….”You couldn’t change your life on 100,000 dollars?”
Not to mention the opening Rex Reed-on-The Larry King Show riff about suggestive sexuality in King Vidor‘s The Fountainhead (’49).
You can’t “enjoy” a film when you know each and every line. You’re wasting your time.
Plus it was vaguely depressing to consider the fact that Brooks, one of the smartest and sharpest 20th Century funny guys and film directors in Hollywood history, never made anything better than Lost in America, and I really, really wanted to revel in what might have happened in its wake.
In her 4.18.85 review, Pauine Kael announced that “Brooks is on to something: satirizing the upper middle class from within, he shows the nagging terror along with the complacency.
“If he could pit [his ad agency character, David Howard] against a few other people as driven and talkative as he is — if a David had to fight for screen time and space with people every bit as competitive — there’s no telling what comedy heights Brooks could scale.”
As it turned out Brooks’ best-ever performances were as Howard and Broadcast News‘ Aaron Altman — a mid ’80s one-two punch that he never repeated or even came close to approximating again. At the end of the day Brooks-the-director had four peak achievements over a 15-year period — Modern Romance (’81), Lost in America, Defending Your Life (’91) and Mother (’96).
“Coddled” was originally published in The New Yorker on 4.18.85; later reprinted in Kael’s “State of the Art” [1985, E. P. Dutton]:
“As David, the L.A. advertising whiz who’s the protagonist of Lost in America, Albert Brooks is only a slightly exaggerated specimen of a large number of rising young businessmen and professional men — the insecure successes, the swollen-headed worriers. He’s the baby that we see inside those prosperous individuals.
“David has a bland moon-face surrounded by an aureole of tight, dark curls; it’s as if he wore his brains on the outside. He looks soft but he isn’t fat — just too well fed. If he were a contented man — say, a musician in a symphony orchestra who picked up extra income from the recording companies — he might be a likable dumpling. But David is an obsessive careerist who agonizes over every detail of his life.
“On the night before he expects to be made senior vice-president of an ad agency [he’s been with for several years], he lies awake wondering whether he and his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), the personnel director of a department store, have done the right thing in putting down a deposit on a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house.
“David still harbors the dream of dropping out– of taking to the road, like the heroes of EasyRider. He’s torturing himself with anxieties, and he keeps waking the exhausted Linda to tell her his misgivings and be comforted by her reassurances.
“David has gotten himself so keyed up for the vice-presidency and has put so much energy into worry about whether he’s picking the right house, the right Mercedes, and the right boat to go with the big job, that when he’s finally in the boss’s office and is offered a different kind of promotion (a big new account that involves a transfer to New York) he doesn’t have the flexibility to deal with it.
“And so he becomes unhinged; he’s like an outraged infant. He howls, he rants. If he can’t have the title he wants, he doesn’t want anything. His explosion comes in waves: he quiets down for a second or two, and then his nasal whine starts up again.
“By the time the scene is over, David has insulted the boss and been fired from his hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job, and is in a state of shock that’s also a state of exaltation, of triumph. He rushes over to his wife’s store, demands that she quit, too, and wants to celebrate this moment of liberation by having sex right this minute on her desk in her glass-encased office.
“Lost in America is a satirical comedy about upper-middle-class infantilism and obnoxiousness — everything that David incarnates.
“Brooks, who directed the film and co-wrote the script (with Monica Johnson, who also worked on his two earlier projects, the 1979 Real Life and the 1981 Modern Romance), has developed a cool, balanced attitude toward himself as performer. The self-absorbed, ingrown David is quite different from the character that Brooks has played in other directors’ movies. Brooks was Cybill Shepherd‘s officious political co-worker in TaxiDriver; he was the unromantic bridegroom who collapsed on his wedding night in PrivateBenjamin; he was the driver in the prologue to TwilightZone – TheMovie; and he was close to inspired as the symphony conductor’s manager in the 1984 UnfaithfullyYours.
“Brooks is a remarkable comic actor — remarkable enough, perhaps, to delude people into thinking he’s just playing himself in Lost in America. It’s true that the camera often seems to be staring at David, revealing his innermost weakness. (He’s always sorry for himself.) And Brooks may have conceived this character because he saw the possibilities for this kind of maddening twerp in himself, but David is a fully created obsessive fool. He’s a highly verbal jerk who half knows he’s behaving like a jerk but can’t stop himself — he’s a self-conscious, pesky toddler at loose in the world.
“But though he’s tiresome to everybody in the movie he isn’t tiresome to us. David’s lines have been sharpened to a fatuous fine edge — he keeps us laughing at him. And Lost in America doesn’t dawdle; it makes its comic points and moves on.
“Hagerty is an ideal choice for David’s mate: you listen to her Linda and you know why she puts up with him. Her little-girl breathiness tells you. And the dim stress and panic of her gaze sugges that somewhere in the past she has been frightened and David is the Teddy bear she clutches. (These two are endlessly apologizing to each other; they do it so automatically they might be apologizing in their sleep.)
“Linda is bleakly pretty; she’s gaunt and hollow-eyed and wispy — she seems to be disappearing. David’s aggressiveness and his near-loony dependence on her don’t faze her. Life fazes her. She’s bored to depression by being cooped up in her office in the department store; she’s depressed by her whole conformist existence. But she’s too timid and worn down to come right out and express her resentment.
And yet curly-headed David, who’s crazy about Linda — kissing her and complimenting her ritually (if nothing else it occupies his mind) — never guesses at her feelings. When these two sell off their property, buy a luxury motor home, and, with the security of a nest egg of roughly a hundred and forty-five thousand, set out to find themselves and get in touch with the real America, the picture has the promising overtones of a Preston Sturges comedy.
“The movie makes a honey of a transition — a cut from the farewell party that David and Linda’s friends give them to a shot of David looking minuscule behind the wheel of the disproportionately large motor home as they leave L.A. The best visual joke in the picture is simply the recurring image of these two people who think themselves dropouts and Easy Riders as they move across the country encased in their thirty-foot Winnebago.
“Along the way, Brooks has a couple of sustained showpiece scenes where he plays off someone who can’t quite believe that this guy is actually saying what he’s saying. After the meek Linda blows their nest egg at the Desert Inn Casino, in Las Vegas, David goes to see the pit boss (well played by Garry Marshall, the director of TheFlamingoKid) and, using his advertising-man skills–and here he’s flexible–tries to persuade this smart, tough fellow to give back the money.
“The most ingenious of David’s gambits is that returning Linda’s losses can be good for business — that the occasion can thus be publicized as a casino with heart, one that periodically plays Santa Claus to losers. Spritzing one proposal after another, as if he’d been hired to prepare a campaign, David beams at the pit boss, he cajoles him; he doesn’t grovel, but you know he would if he thought it would have any effect. And his adversary is amused by the agility of David’s thought processes. (In a Preston Sturges comedy, the pit boss might have gone loco and actually adopted the Christmas-casino idea.)
“David also has an interview scene with an employment agent (Art Frankel) in a desolate small town in Arizona; when David tells the agent how much he was earning, the old guy is infatuated with the numbers and can’t resist tweaking him by repeating the amount over and over.
“David and Linda’s experiences in the real America turn out to be a two-week vacation, and the movie has a nice, quick wrap-up. In terms of David’s character, the end says all that needs to be said. And probably there’s no way for Brooks to develop the plot any further, because he sees David as hopeless–as upper-middle-class in every soft fibre of his anxious, coddled being.
“But the movie needs another turnaround, because although the ending is right for David, it isn’t right for Linda. Once she’s away from her hated job, she becomes prettier and more bouncy. She is perhaps even too adorable at times, but not glaringly. (Hagerty may look like the old-fashioned girl that suitors would bring nosegays to, but she’s a gifted, sexy comedienne.) Linda’s losing the money seems to free the movie, to open it, and she herself relaxes a bit. David becomes more compulsive than ever. His worst terror has been realized, and his mind never shuts down. He tries to hold his anger in, but when he’s looking out over Hoover Dam he can’t help yelling about the money, and once again the joke is in the disproportion between him and the physical setting.
“David keeps going over what has happened. He picks at it; he bleeds. But Linda, having done the unthinkable, is able for the first time to laugh at him. And there’s the suggestion that her blowing the money wasn’t a totally subconscious protest: in her tiny, touching voice, she maneuvered David away from his plan that they go to the Silver Bell Chapel to renew their marriage vows, and got him to take her to the Desert Inn. Afterward, her only explanation to David is ‘I held things in for so long I felt like I was going to burst.’ By talking her into quitting her job, David has unloosed something in her that Brooks and his co-writer don’t quite know what to do with.
“The movie is so good that it needs to flower; it’s like a Sturges idea that runs dry. But it’s still a nifty, original comedy.”
The fact that Jack Nicholson was “that guy” between the late ’60s to the mid ’90s, especially the first few years when he was relatively slender and had decent hair…that, for me, was part of the joy of living, fan-wise, absorption-wise. Nicholson’s hot run began with Easy Rider (’69) and lasted over 25 fucking years. Okay, he didn’t really start to downshift until after his last great role, in The Departed (’06).
This morning a producer friend told me about how Jack Nicholson saved Jim Harrison‘s financial ass in 1978 with a loan of $15K.
The late author-poet (whose recent death prompted yesterday’s post) became friendly with Nicholson through novelist and screenwriter Thomas McGuane, who had written The Missouri Breaks (’76). McGuane and Harrison had met from their mutual base of Livingston, Montana. Harrison published three books in the early to mid ’70s — “Wolf: A False Memoir” (’71), “A Good Day to Die” (’73) and “Farmer” (’76), but the income from these works was negligible and by ’78 he was “broke and all but starving,” the producer relates. Harrison was working on “Legends of the Fall” (which was actually three novellas — “Revenge,” “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” and “Legends of the Fall”) and so Nicholson, advised by McGuane of Harrison’s desperate situation, stepped in with the $15K, which gave Harrison enough breathing room to finish. “Fall” was published in ’79. It became Harrison’s biggest success of his life at the time, and he lived more or less comfortably after that.
Posted by yours truly 22 years ago: “There’s this better-than-pretty-good film about wealthy jaded Hollywood types called Play It As It Lays, and no under-40 person reading this column has heard of it, much less seen it.
“The director was the once-very-hot Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Rancho Deluxe, Mommie Dearest), and it was based on a respected 1970 Joan Didion novel of the same name, which Ben Stein once called ‘the best novel about Hollywood ever.’
“The stars were Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins (playing a cynical gay producer and giving the second-best performance of his life, after Psycho‘s Norman Bates), Adam Roarke (best thing he ever did), Tammy Grimes, Ruth Ford and several others you’ve probably never heard of.
“It stood out, as I recall, for its unusually dark and nihilistic portrait of some very skewed souls in the employ of the film industry, and for Perry’s fragmented, back-and-forth cutting that was not only in keeping with the style in which Didion’s book was written, but with the randomness of thoughts flicking around inside the head of its main character, Maria Wyeth (Weld).
“It was gloomy, ambitious, ‘different’ (even by unconventional ’70s standards), and Persona-like. It had a chilly, almost spooky fascination with downer attitudes among the moneyed elite. Some of the big gun critics bashed it, but others were admiring and spoke of Oscar-level achievement.
For many, many years there’s been no Bluray or DVD of Play It As It Lays, which opened 52 and 1/2 years ago (10.19.72 or two weeks before Richard Nixon‘s landslide re-election). 15 or 20 years ago it briefly played on the Sundance Channel; a decade ago it screened at the Hollywood Blvd. American Cinematheque, and then at the AC’s Los Feliz theatre three or four years ago.
And now…deliverance! A restored 4K DCP of this brilliant, all-but-forgotten film is currently showing at Manhattan’s Film Forum. (The final day is Thursday, 3.20.) Play it As It Lays wouldn’t have been restored if the rights hadn’t been cleared for a Bluray and streaming. I read somewhere that Indicator has the British Bluray home video rights.
One way or another Perry’s film will be commercially available to home viewers before long. After decades upon decades of absence.
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...
