The Year of the Small Movie

If you like “small” films, 2020 was your year.  Next week the 93rd Academy Awards will take place – with people present, no less – celebrating the movies of 2020, a strange year in so many ways that it seems fitting that the film industry wasn’t exempt.  With theaters closed or sparsely attended in 2020, many movies were held back for release in 2021 or were released with little fanfare on streaming services.  I missed seeing previews – often the biggest indicator for me on what to see – and instead had to trust that I was getting wind of good films despite abbreviated or non-existent theatrical runs. Ultimately, I watched twenty-two movies released in 2020, including all eight Best Picture nominees, and while many of them were really good, the mood and feel of many of them were – for lack of a better word – “small.”  I was struck with a maddening desire to watch some honest-to-goodness plot-twisting Hollywood creations, words I never thought I’d utter. 

In 2018 when I saw The Florida Project, I was blown away.  I wrote then, “The Florida Project is one of those rare films that I gravitate toward – short on plot, long on characters and realistic slices of life.”  And while that’s still true, it turns out that if you watch a dozen Florida Project-type films in a row, suddenly small slices of life don’t seem so novel anymore.  In fact, they can seem downright infuriating.

In quick succession I watched Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami, The Forty-Year Old Version, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Dig, Malcolm & Marie, Sound of Metal, Supernova, Nomadland, Minari, First Cow and The Father.  Goodness.  Some of those films are excellent – of these, I liked One Night in Miami and The Forty-Year Old Version best – but by the end of that run I was practically begging for a plot.  A development.  A murder.  Something!  Something more than two guys surreptitiously milking a cow!  Too much of a good thing can in fact be too much of a good thing.

In the midst of all of these films, my wife and I also watched Promising Young Woman and Judas and the Black Messiah, and both of these nailed it.  Excellent films, and for us, a breath of fresh air to kick off the dust of our plotless movie run.  Sadly, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things and The Forty-Year Old Version garnered no Oscar nominations, and One Night In Miami was ignored for Best Picture and Director.  That’s the way these awards shows always go.

But when reviewing this year’s films to last year’s, it seems like a lifetime ago when we were cheering on Parasite, Ford V Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood (plus Uncut Gems and Knives Out), a better batch of films than this year’s, in my opinion.  I’m holding out hope that the 94th Academy Awards will celebrate a terrific set of movies both small and large.

Mank, Women and Context

After viewing the new David Fincher film Mank last weekend, I texted this to my buddy:

“The thing that bothered me was the drastic age differential between the men and the women.  I didn’t believe for one second that Mank was in his forties or even in his thirties in the flashbacks.  And his wife looked like she was about 22 years old, so when she talked about them having been married for 20 years, I almost chuckled.”

I may have almost chuckled, but it’s no laughing matter, as highlighted in the Andrea Towers article for The Wrap.  To take nothing away from the fine acting performances of Tuppence Middleton, Lily Collins or Amanda Seyfried, there is a legitimate complaint against Hollywood casting younger women in roles that would be more appropriately acted by older women.  Gary Oldman is thirty years older than Middleton, despite their characters having been the same age in real life.  Why not have Sara Mankowitz played by a 40-something actress?  It harkens back to 1950s Hollywood, when Audrey Hepburn was cast as a love interest alongside actors like Cary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart (ew!), what I imagine was the result of older male casting directors projecting their own desires.  Hollywood may have taken a few steps toward a more egalitarian industry, but it still has a long way to go.

Mank also inspired a discussion with my adult children, and we took opposite sides of the argument.  I argued that while I enjoyed Mank, it was the very helpful to have the context of having seen Citizen Kane and knowing some of the background of the players involved.  My son argued that if you need context to enjoy and understand a movie, then it’s not a good movie; that it fails in its essential role of being a stand-alone piece of art.  Yes, context may enhance a film’s enjoyment and understanding, but it shouldn’t be required.

But I wonder about this.  After all, could one really understand a Civil War drama like Glory without having some knowledge of American history and the role that slavery has played in shaping it?  Or more recently, I wonder how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood played to young people who knew nothing of the Manson murders.  They must have been moderately baffled when the film focused so long on Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, only to have it lead absolutely nowhere.  For me, knowing the real life tragedy had my stomach knotting up at the film’s climax.  For others, it must have seemed like a trifle, a comic thriller.  This perhaps strengthens my son’s argument, because context may have helped the film, but it wasn’t required.  But I have to believe that Tarantino made the film fully expecting his audience to be informed about the Manson murders.

Even non-historical movies benefit from some measure of context, and it’s why cross-dressing comedies like Tootsie or Some Like it Hot might not play as well today as they did at the time.  Or why today John Wayne’s character in The Searchers seems outrageously cruel, though at the time his treatment of an American Indian woman was treated as comedy.  Or circling back to women and how they’ve been portrayed in Hollywood, many comedies of yesterday fall flat today unless you have some acceptance of the more subservient role women played in decades past.

As for Mank, it gets off on its name-dropping moments, and I think without some knowledge of the past the film must be a rather laborious affair. Some of the name-drops are offered more as a wink to a knowing audience than as necessary ingredients to the film’s storytelling, but they tend to unnecessarily muddy the waters. This is in contract to, say, the way music references enhance character in High Fidelity rather than bogging the film down.  Mank falls short for this reason.  It’s a good film.  It is not a great film.