If I told you that Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones did a movie, where they were the only two actors, written by Cormac McCarthy, and produced by HBO, would that interest you? Of course! Yet, it came and went in 2011 and made barely a ripple in the culture.
Sure, both greats have had questionable track records in recent years, but The Sunset Limited shows they still have Oscar winning chops, though they're both probably on the outer limits of their award winning form.
It's too bad that McCarthy didn't write more screenplays, because imagining peak, Pulp Fiction era Sam Jackson spouting his words is awfully tantalizing. It's immediately clear that they have the kind of actor-screenwriter relationship that Christoph Waltz and Quentin Tarantino do--it's like they share a brain, like the writer knows exactly how the actor's brain and face and soul work. Jackson is the perfect actor to deliver McCarthy's ponderous, verbose, but still humble lines.
Tommy Lee Jones has been in a McCarthy production before, as the titular Old Man, but he really lets loose here. The plot is that Jones tries to kill himself by jumping in front of the titular train, but Jackson stops him and brings him to his ratty apartment to try to talk some life into him. Jones becomes gradually more impressed with the mind and soul of Jackson, and they have an earnest back and forth in real time for over an hour. It's like a tennis match, where the stakes are a man's very soul, and the validity of drawing breath and experiencing life itself. Jones, a college professor, is on the defensive most of the time, just volleying Jackson's ideas back to him, and Jackson is trying his damnedest to convince Jones that life is a beautiful thing.
This is nice enough to watch, as Jackson gets several great, long, juicy monologues which he tears into with FURRRIOUS anger levels of gusto. It's as much as anyone could expect from Jackson at this point in his career, and shows how much better he is than the roles he's taken lately. But Mr. Jackson loves to get paid.
As the discussion goes on, and Jackson offers Jones his third cup of coffee, anything to keep him away from that train station, Jones finally springs into action. It becomes clear that he's been holding back considerably the whole time, out of respect for the sincere attempts Jackson was making to convince him that life isn't shit. But he reaches a point where he can't hold back any more, and unleashes the full power of his darkness. Jackson holds his head in his hands and writhes around as the evilly true words come tumbling mightily from Tommy Lee Jones's weathered, craggy face.
It isn't just that he is defending his right to self-terminate--he is giving an intensely erotic ode to death itself, which he reveres and relishes more than anything in life. Death itself is the most attractive thing possible, beyond just being a solace. It contains unrivaled wonders unavailable to the living--like the pinnacle of quietness, the absence of all community, the sturdiness of the most ancient thing imaginable.
Though there are times in their discussion where we think Tommy Lee Jones is on the verge of buying into Sam Jackson's love of life, at the end we see that no power can come between a man and his one true love. Especially if that love is death herself. What really shatters Jackson at the end is his realization that he has never, and probably will never, love anything quite so intensely as Tommy Lee Jones loves death.
Perhaps the film made barely a ripple in the culture because of how very dark it is. But I'll take McCarthy being dark over McCarthy trying his hand at big-budget star-studded mainstream thrillers any day.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Friday, August 8, 2014
The Killing
The Killing's fourth and maybe, probably, almost definitely final season came to Netflix last week, and it should be getting a lot more love than it has been from major media outlets and taste arbiters and think-piece peddlers and what have you.
I could talk about the fantastic acting between the two leads, Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Steve Holder (Joel Kinnaman), the terrifying performance by the young, unknown actor who played the killer (and not just a killer, but an entire-family-murdering killer), the buzzy Joan Allen performance, or the appropriately expanded role for Gregg Henry's Detective Reddick, who gradually but believably transformed from suspected murdering pedophile into the moral center of the show.
But what really matters is the last scene of the last episode, when Linden realizes that the little moments that made up most of what we saw in the show was as good as it got for her. Most characters in filmed entertainment bring a significant back-story, and we assume that they had full lives filled with relationships, losses, joys, dinner parties, bar crawls and everything else that the contemporary well-adjusted professional person's life consists of. We assume that what we see during the film or show is just a small slice out of the larger pie of who they really are--we are just seeing a glimpse of their working life, maybe something of their home life, but for the most part they are more than what we are shown.
The one main through line in all four seasons of The Killing was Linden and Holder driving around rainy Seattle, smoking cigarettes, talking out the case they were working. Whatever else happened, they were always back in that car, Holder trying to seem like a professional, reliable man and not the tweaked out junkie he really was, Linden trying to foster something of a human personality.
One of the more affecting moments in the final season was when Linden overheard her semi-estranged son explaining to someone that he wanted to live with his mom because he feels bad that she has no one in her life. She's just a ghost who solves crimes and rips cigarettes and goes back to her empty house, keeping up the lie that she is more than that in her little interactions with people throughout the day. Hearing this forced Linden to confront her emptiness, and inspired her to scramble for whatever was true and nutritive in her life.
But at the end of the last episode, she realizes that those little moments in the car with Holder were everything--those were the best times of her life, and should not be shrugged off like meaningless connective tissue between more significant events. It's a beautiful realization in that special way things are beautiful when acknowledging how small and fragile life really is, by celebrating the most reliably ready and consistent moments of ease, no matter how unspectacular they may be.
It's hard to overstate how great that last scene was. It was like Mulder and Scully, albeit with several fewer seasons of history, realizing that the person you spend most of your time with really is your best friend, and that keeping up the fiction that there's more interesting stuff going on outside of those experiences is exhausting and unnecessary. What bravery it takes to embrace a truth like that, that the small moments are everything.
I could talk about the fantastic acting between the two leads, Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Steve Holder (Joel Kinnaman), the terrifying performance by the young, unknown actor who played the killer (and not just a killer, but an entire-family-murdering killer), the buzzy Joan Allen performance, or the appropriately expanded role for Gregg Henry's Detective Reddick, who gradually but believably transformed from suspected murdering pedophile into the moral center of the show.
But what really matters is the last scene of the last episode, when Linden realizes that the little moments that made up most of what we saw in the show was as good as it got for her. Most characters in filmed entertainment bring a significant back-story, and we assume that they had full lives filled with relationships, losses, joys, dinner parties, bar crawls and everything else that the contemporary well-adjusted professional person's life consists of. We assume that what we see during the film or show is just a small slice out of the larger pie of who they really are--we are just seeing a glimpse of their working life, maybe something of their home life, but for the most part they are more than what we are shown.
The one main through line in all four seasons of The Killing was Linden and Holder driving around rainy Seattle, smoking cigarettes, talking out the case they were working. Whatever else happened, they were always back in that car, Holder trying to seem like a professional, reliable man and not the tweaked out junkie he really was, Linden trying to foster something of a human personality.
One of the more affecting moments in the final season was when Linden overheard her semi-estranged son explaining to someone that he wanted to live with his mom because he feels bad that she has no one in her life. She's just a ghost who solves crimes and rips cigarettes and goes back to her empty house, keeping up the lie that she is more than that in her little interactions with people throughout the day. Hearing this forced Linden to confront her emptiness, and inspired her to scramble for whatever was true and nutritive in her life.
But at the end of the last episode, she realizes that those little moments in the car with Holder were everything--those were the best times of her life, and should not be shrugged off like meaningless connective tissue between more significant events. It's a beautiful realization in that special way things are beautiful when acknowledging how small and fragile life really is, by celebrating the most reliably ready and consistent moments of ease, no matter how unspectacular they may be.
It's hard to overstate how great that last scene was. It was like Mulder and Scully, albeit with several fewer seasons of history, realizing that the person you spend most of your time with really is your best friend, and that keeping up the fiction that there's more interesting stuff going on outside of those experiences is exhausting and unnecessary. What bravery it takes to embrace a truth like that, that the small moments are everything.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
The Importance of The Big Chill
1983's The Big Chill is not a great movie. It's a comedy about serious issues that is neither particularly funny nor dramatic. But it is an interesting film, and interesting in a way that ensures it would never be made in the 2014 film climate.
This is a meandering, plotless film, about nothing more than the characters hanging out. We do still get these movies, notably in the Joe Swanberg-led mumblecore movement, but these are mainly VOD curiosities, attracting excellent actors, but not the mainstream big names who serve as a touchstone for all of us.
The Big Chill featured many of the biggest name comic and dramatic actors of the time, with Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Glenn Close, and Tom Berenger to name only the biggest stars of the film. Each of them, in 1983, could probably have anchored a major movie by themselves, so having them all together was a pretty big deal. Of course, big names do work together nowadays, but almost always under the pretext of a big summer tentpole action film, rather than a depiction of quarter life crises.
This is the kind of theme that gets treated in prestige cable TV now, but there's something to be said for doing it in a movie, where you can just spend two hours intensely getting to know some characters who are going through basic human things, rather than committing all of the time a TV show requires. Also, TV tends to by necessity be more informational and plot-heavy, so the real meandering nature of a movie like The Big Chill would probably be sacrificed.
In today's quarter life crisis dramadies on TV, most notably HBO's Girls, we get to know characters over dozens of hours of programming, and they change, grow, make mistakes, and have triumphs. In films like The Big Chill, we are more just dropped in on their already in-progress lives, and have to figure out who they are on the fly. That seems like a more accurate representation of life, rather than parceling out information about characters piecemeal. Tone, atmosphere, and mood are more firmly established in a film that presents its characters in situ, rather than one that develops. We are looking in on some self-contained ecosystem, rather than being shown how this ecosystem develops. Voyeurism versus conspiratoriality--I don't necessarily want to be a co-conspirator with my entertainment.
Judd Apatow, of course, has made countless such quarter or third life dramadies over the past decade--but characters in his film are never too far from going for the big joke. It seems to be considered unsafe for a studio to release a movie without characters who are at least as funny as amateur stand up comedians. But this always puts me at something of a remove--why are these people straining so hard to be funny? Why can't they just be people? People aren't usually that funny, and that is okay.
There are jokes in The Big Chill, but not nearly as many as the typical Apatow production, and not nearly as lewd. There was something nice about a time when adults didn't share thesis-length thoughts and barbs on topics like cumming, shitting, and anal bleeding.
I suppose Wes Anderson does quarter life crisis films on occasion, The Royal Tenenbaums being the most notable one--but there's always a thick, gauzy layer of self-conscious style. In The Big Chill the only style is the lack of style--we are simply shown human beings. David O. Russell is big on showing real people too, but there's always a highly important locale, occupation, or other kind of theme that frames the characters in an important way. Lawrence Kasdan was certainly a big name director in his day, but The Big Chill is anything but a vehicle for his own aesthetic.
The stars of the film allow their natural movie star charisma to propel things, but they aren't dialing back or dialing up. They are just being themselves, and they are inherently interesting enough to make that mean something. The contemporary equivalent would be something like letting Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Channing Tatum, and Bradley Cooper just exist as people, without an endless supply of one-liners, without the weight of a genre or tight plot or period-piece informing everything.
The Big Chill was just a low-stakes movie with some of our biggest stars hanging out. Today, our most watchable actors simply playing human beings without being tied to genre, plot, period, or gimmick is a far more ridiculous proposition than showing an alien invasion, or world-ending natural disaster, or space opera.
This is a meandering, plotless film, about nothing more than the characters hanging out. We do still get these movies, notably in the Joe Swanberg-led mumblecore movement, but these are mainly VOD curiosities, attracting excellent actors, but not the mainstream big names who serve as a touchstone for all of us.
The Big Chill featured many of the biggest name comic and dramatic actors of the time, with Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Glenn Close, and Tom Berenger to name only the biggest stars of the film. Each of them, in 1983, could probably have anchored a major movie by themselves, so having them all together was a pretty big deal. Of course, big names do work together nowadays, but almost always under the pretext of a big summer tentpole action film, rather than a depiction of quarter life crises.
This is the kind of theme that gets treated in prestige cable TV now, but there's something to be said for doing it in a movie, where you can just spend two hours intensely getting to know some characters who are going through basic human things, rather than committing all of the time a TV show requires. Also, TV tends to by necessity be more informational and plot-heavy, so the real meandering nature of a movie like The Big Chill would probably be sacrificed.
In today's quarter life crisis dramadies on TV, most notably HBO's Girls, we get to know characters over dozens of hours of programming, and they change, grow, make mistakes, and have triumphs. In films like The Big Chill, we are more just dropped in on their already in-progress lives, and have to figure out who they are on the fly. That seems like a more accurate representation of life, rather than parceling out information about characters piecemeal. Tone, atmosphere, and mood are more firmly established in a film that presents its characters in situ, rather than one that develops. We are looking in on some self-contained ecosystem, rather than being shown how this ecosystem develops. Voyeurism versus conspiratoriality--I don't necessarily want to be a co-conspirator with my entertainment.
Judd Apatow, of course, has made countless such quarter or third life dramadies over the past decade--but characters in his film are never too far from going for the big joke. It seems to be considered unsafe for a studio to release a movie without characters who are at least as funny as amateur stand up comedians. But this always puts me at something of a remove--why are these people straining so hard to be funny? Why can't they just be people? People aren't usually that funny, and that is okay.
There are jokes in The Big Chill, but not nearly as many as the typical Apatow production, and not nearly as lewd. There was something nice about a time when adults didn't share thesis-length thoughts and barbs on topics like cumming, shitting, and anal bleeding.
I suppose Wes Anderson does quarter life crisis films on occasion, The Royal Tenenbaums being the most notable one--but there's always a thick, gauzy layer of self-conscious style. In The Big Chill the only style is the lack of style--we are simply shown human beings. David O. Russell is big on showing real people too, but there's always a highly important locale, occupation, or other kind of theme that frames the characters in an important way. Lawrence Kasdan was certainly a big name director in his day, but The Big Chill is anything but a vehicle for his own aesthetic.
The stars of the film allow their natural movie star charisma to propel things, but they aren't dialing back or dialing up. They are just being themselves, and they are inherently interesting enough to make that mean something. The contemporary equivalent would be something like letting Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Channing Tatum, and Bradley Cooper just exist as people, without an endless supply of one-liners, without the weight of a genre or tight plot or period-piece informing everything.
The Big Chill was just a low-stakes movie with some of our biggest stars hanging out. Today, our most watchable actors simply playing human beings without being tied to genre, plot, period, or gimmick is a far more ridiculous proposition than showing an alien invasion, or world-ending natural disaster, or space opera.
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