Frances McDormand in NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
This week: the best film of 2020, Nomadland, is streaming. Recenty catching up to Nomadland, Sound of Metal, Mayor and Black Bear allowed me to finalize my Best Movies of 2020.
ON VIDEO
Nomadland: The fierce authenticity of Frances McDormand’s performance and Chloé Zhao’s genius with nonprofessional actors illuminates this extraordinary film with humanity. Streaming on Hulu.
Minari: This autobiographical drama of family cohesion is set in the immigrant experience. Streaming from various VOD providers.
Other current films:
Sound of Metal: Seeking anything but stillness. Amazon (included with Prime).
Black Bear: Ever surprising. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play
Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
On February 28, Turner Classic Movies airs Days of Wine and Roses, Blake Edwards’ unflinching exploration of alcoholism, featuring great performances by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick (both nominated for Oscars) and Charles Bickford.
Frances McDormand in NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Recently catching up with Nomadland, Sound of Metal, Mayor and Black Bear has allowed me to finalize my Best Movies of 2020. In the Year of Pandemic, I somehow managed to watch one hundred and fifteen 2020 movies (and another one hundred and forty-nine movies from earlier years). Here are the thirteen that I most admire and engage with.
To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.
Chadwick Boseman in MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM. Photo courtesy of Netflix.
In the family drama Minari, the father (Steven Tuen) in a Korean immigrant family moves them all to rural Arkansas to realize his dream of becoming a landed farmer. But, does everyone share the same dream? Is everyone willing to make the tradeoffs necessary to achieve it?
He’s been working in California for ten years at an industrial hatchery as a lowly paid chicken sexer (yep, ya always learn something at the movies). This is the moment when he can finally afford his own 50 acres, and, upon arriving at his own property, he is triumphant. His wife (Yeri Han), taking the measure of the remote setting and the manufactured-home-on-wheels, doesn’t see it that way.
To make things more tolerable, she moves her spirited mom (Yuh-jung Youn) into the household. (Spoiler: don’t let dotty grandma operate the incinerator.) The family faces the challenges of entrepreneurship and the new surroundings.
Although the story is set in the immigrant experience, I don’t see the film as about immigration. It’s more universal than that. Far from bewildered and exploited, the dad here is confident and dismissive of the locals’ superstitions. He believes and acts as if he were the master of his own fate.
Minari is more about whether the family is a team, cohesively committed to the same goal. Just what is redemption supposed to look like here? The story of Minari is autobiographical – drawn from the childhood of its writer-director Lee Isaac Chung. Chung’s film is well-crafted, but not thrilling.
The prolific character actor Will Patton excels in a fine part as a good-hearted Pentecostal Arkansan, who is determined to build a friendship with the farmer dad.
Alan S. Kim is especially good as the youngest child, the surrogate for director Chung at age seven. Yuh-jung Youn is also stellar as the grandma.
Yuen is a superb actor with an uncanny gift for showing up in really good movies: I Origins, Okja, Sorry to Bother You, Burning. Here, he’s good in a less challenging role than he’s used to.
I saw Minari at an A24 screening accessible to SFFILM members. It releases more widely on VOD this weekend.
Frances McDormand in NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Nomadland is an extraordinary film, illuminated with a profound humanity. That humanity stems from the fierce authenticity of Frances McDormand’s performance and Chloé Zhao’s genius with nonprofessional actors.
McDormand plays Fern, a widow who lost her lifestyle when her longtime husband died and when the closing of the gypsum mine killed their hometown – to the extent that even the zip code for Empire, Nevada, was discontinued. Without the means to afford to live in her own house or apartment, she lives in her van and travels between seasonal jobs – at Amazon’s warehouse in Fernley, Nevada, during the holiday crush and at tourist campgrounds during the summer.
Fern is not alone. She finds a community of nomads – Americans her age, who travel the West in their RV homes between subsistence jobs. One of them, Bob Wells, organizes nomad round ups outside of Quartzsite, Arizona.
Zhao deploys these real people as characters in Nomadland and incorporates their real stories into the story that she is telling. Indeed, these nomad perspectives give us two of Nomadand’s most powerful moments – a monologue by a woman named Swankie about her acceptance of her mortality and Bob’s comments on the loss of his son.
McDormand’s Fern misses the life she had with her husband, but she has moved on to another chapter – one in which she has traded convenience and material amenities for independence. She may have to poop in a bucket, but (except when she needs her sister’s help to repair her van) she’s not obligated to anyone or anything. Another nomad, Dave (David Straithern), is attracted to her, but she warily and firmly regards Dave’s sweet bumbling attentions.
Is Nomadland a portrait of victims? Is it a political statement? There’s no question that the American political and socioeconomic systems have failed these people. But the nomads are not people who accept defeat.
McDormand’s flinty performance is a tour de force. Her Fern is as immortal as her Marge Gunderson in Fargo or her Mildred in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
They say that acting is reacting, and McDormand’s engaged listening magnifies the impact of Swankie’s and Bob’s speeches. Her increasingly purposeful stroll through the Badlands, at first solitary and then observed by Dave, expresses the value she places on her independence. McDormand has almost no dialogue in two of most powerful and indelible scenes – in the Badlands and on the Mendocino Coast.
McDormand, Straithern and Melissa Smith, who plays Fern’s sister Molly, are the only professional actors in Nomadland. Smith is conservatory director and head of acting in the MFA program at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT), but has never before acted for the screen. (As a child, musician Tay Straithern, son of David, appeared in two of his dad’s movies.)
Zhao’s screenplay is based on Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-first Century, and some of the folks interviewed by Bruder are featured in the film.
Her previous film, The Rider, with a nonprofessional actor as the protagonist, made me into a huge Chloé Zhao fan. Next up for Zhao is a Marvel franchise movie with big stars, she deserves the payday.
I’m annoyed that IMDb and some other sources describe Chloé Zhao as a “Chinese director”. Although she was born in Beijing, I consider Zhao an American filmmaker. As a child, she left China for a London boarding school and finished high school in LA; she graduated from college and film school in the US, and has made all of her movies in America. Besides, what other filmmaker has set her last three movies in South Dakota, for chrissakes?
The reflective nature of Nomadland is enhanced by the vast landscapes that swallow the characters, beautifully shot by cinematographer Joshua James Richards. Richards, Zhao’s partner and the DP on her two previous films, has a gift for celebrating the panoramas and Big Skies of the Mountain West. He seems to specialize in dramatic clouds, multi-hued sunsets and sparks from campfires lifting into the night.
NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
The understated music of composer Ludovico Einaudi is perfect for Zhao’s story. Einaudi’s music is often featured on Radio Paradise., the blogging soundtrack of The Movie Gourmet.
Nomadland is the critical consensus choice as the year’s best film and tops my Best Movies of 2020. It is streaming on Hulu.
Tonight Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland with Frances McDormand can be streamed. I haven’t seen it yet, but, after The Rider, I’m a huge Chloé Zhao fan, so I’ll be watching and writing about it soon. Nomadland is the critical consensus choice as the year’s best film.
Here’s my remembrance of the late cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno with some of his images and a link to a brilliant video essay.
ON VIDEO
Sound of Metal: This psychological pressure-cooker is super intense ride, but there’s a satisfying payoff. Both Riz Ahmed’s performance and the sound design are Oscar-worthy. Amazon (included with Prime).
Black Bear: Making full use of Aubrey Plaza’s unique gifts, this dark comedy is edge-of-the-seat movie and a cauldron of surprises. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You: The reflections of the Boss bring poignancy without melancholy to this musical documentary. We glimpse creative collaboration in the recording studio and get a range of songs, from the heartbreaking to the exhilarating. AppleTV.
More current films:
Mayor: potholes and tear gas, all in a day’s work. Roxie.
MLK/FBI: about America then and about America today. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Thanks to the unique gifts of Aubrey Plaza, writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine’s dark comedy Black Bear is a cauldron of surprises. This is an edge-of-the-seat movie where you cannot predict what is going to happen next – or at least how it is going to happen.
At first, Black Bear seems like a dark comedy of manners. And then there’s a complete reset. In a movie-within-a-movie, the tone goes from broadly comic to nail-biting, with a satisfying final payoff about the creative process. I’m not going to spoil the story by getting anymore explicit about the its construction – but the audience needs to be a bit nimble.
As Levine unspools his story, reels it back in and unspools it again, Black Bear is a roller coaster. As Sheila O’Malley writes, “This is a disturbing film, and much of it is unpleasant, but it’s also very, very funny.“
Plaza plays Allison, a film writer-director who becomes the only guest at a woodsy lakeside B&B owned by (Gabe) Christopher Abbott and (Blair) Sarah Gadon. Allison is isolating to work on writer’s block, but she soon becomes absorbed by Gabe and Blair, a couple whose unnecessary bickering signals that they are on each other’s very last nerve. Two of the characters tell significant lies, and why they lie is revealing about each of them.
As to Allison, from her first kinda-flirty-but-with-sharper-elbows banter, you can tell she’s trouble. Plaza excels in playing a character who is hiding her acidly judgy thoughts with a mask of deadpan social almost-appropriateness. Mick LaSalle describes Plaza thusly: “This is someone who has made her name in comedies, but whose distinct quality — a certain unknowability, a certain watchfulness, a certain suggestion of some underlying hostility — always seemed like it would lend itself to drama, at least theoretically.”
Blair (exasperated): You’re really hard to read.
Allison (brightly): I get that a lot.
The playwright Paola Lázaro is especially good as the harried AD trying to hold it together as shooting the last scene of the film-within-the-film becomes ever more imperiled. There’s also a very funny running joke about script supervisor who doesn’t grasp the concept of you have one job.
When you watch Black Bear, keep one thing in mind – Allison is trying to devise a story for her next film.
Black Bear is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The documentary Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You, sometimes sage and sometimes exhilarating, is a companion movie to the latest studio album from Springsteen and the E Street Band.
This is an obvious MUST SEE for devoted Springsteen fans like The Wife. For everyone else, Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is worthwhile for Bruce’s comments (in narration and in song), the creative collaboration in the recording studio and the songs themselves.
Springsteen is now 71 and this film was shot a year-and-a-half-ago. He is frankly conscious of mortality, the explicit subject of two of the songs. I’ll See You in My Dreams is a heartbreaking call to friends who have passed. Last Man Standing came to Bruce when he found himself the sole survivor of his high school band, The Castiles. (BTW that’s a way cool band name for back when Ricardo Montalban was hawking “rich Corinthian leather”.)
Springsteen’s reflections bring poignancy without melancholy.
On the upbeat side, The Power of Prayer is about devotion and charismatic experience – but the kind we get from pop music. We recognize that this is from the songwriter of Girls in their Summer Clothes.
The best song IMO – and the hardest rocking – is Burnin’ Train. Turn up the volume and settle into Max Weinberg’s drumming and Garry Talent’s bass line. Sounds like an extremely tight band of 20-somethings.
In the studio, we get a glimpse into the collaborative aspect of songwriting and recording, where the musicians and producers get the charts and then start making suggestions about how to hone each song.
Writing rock music is usually a young person’s jam, with the best and the most productivity front-loaded in the earliest segments of songwriting careers. It’s remarkable that Springsteen still is imagining and forging such vital songs. And it’s remarkable that the E Street Band, almost all of them about 70, still can crush and shred.
Director Thom Zimny is Bruce’s personal filmmaker, and also made the fine HBO doc Elvis Presley: The Searcher. The quick cutting of the scenes in the recording studios allow us to miss the drudgery of repeated takes and highlight the sparks of creativity. The exterior shots of the winter-bare woods of rural New Jersey remind me of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. This is a very handsome black-and-white film.
Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is streaming on AppleTV.
In Sound of Metal, Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is a heavy metal drummer who suffers immediate and severe hearing loss, complicated because he’s also an addict who has been clean for an uneasy four years. He and his guitarist girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) have been barnstorming through a series of one-nght engagements in their Airstream RV. Ruben is emotionally devastated, and Lou, fearing his relapse, drops him off with drug counselor Joe (Paul Raci) at a twelve-step residence within an all-deaf community.
Ruben may not be using, but he may not be “in recovery”, either. His sobriety hangs on a scaffold of performance, Lou, healthy exercise and constant travel. When his musicianship is snatched away by hearing loss, he panics. The very idea of deafness paralyzes Ruben with terror.
Ruben cycles through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, escape and resistance. Will he get to acceptance and redemption? Joe tells Ruben that he needs to attain the ability to sit with himself in stillness, but Ruben wants anything but that.
Sound of Metal is a super intense ride, but there’s a payoff. The powerful ending is perfect. Director and co-writer Darius Marder follows Billy Wilder’s advice – don’t stick around.
Riz Ahmed’s totally committed and gripping performance as Ruben will likely garner him an Oscar nod. In thinking about his performance days later, I realized that Ahmed was convincing as Ruben played heavy metal, as he veered in desperation and as he mentored deaf children with gentleness and humor.
At one point, I said, “he’s acting just like an addict” seconds before Joe says something like “From where I sit, you’re acting like an addict“.
Olivia Cooke, so good in Me and Earl and the Dying Girland Thoroughbreds, is okay here as Lou. In the first part of the movie, she’s unrecognizable with unflattering bleached eyebrows.
Paul Raci, an actor who became fluent in ASL to communicate with his deaf parents, is just a perfect delight as Joe. I’m suspecting that this character actor/musician (he has a Black Sabbath tribute band) will get more movie work after this turn.
The French actor/director Mathieu Amalric is absolutely superb as Lou’s father. Amalric is a big deal actor who is cast in a lot of prestige films (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I am usually indifferent to him. But here, he absolutely nails a character who is comfortable in his own skin, wise enough to discern what is going on with others less experienced than he and willing, with patience and gentleness, to let life play out. His character is a guy who probably hasn’t gotten to where he is by being kind, so his kindness is a choice.
The brilliant, Oscar-deserving sound design brings us to experience what Ruben can hear and not hear. Make sure that you watch this film on a system or device with excellent sound. Walter Murch will appreciate this movie (which is very high praise from me.).
Sound of Metal is one of my Best Movies of 2020. It is streaming on Amazon (included with Prime).
Cinema is a visual art form, and images, along with the music, sound and the dialogue, tell the story. I’m thinking about this obvious point because the great cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno died last week at age 97. Rotunno could frame showy eye candy, of course, like his shot from Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen above. But, check out how Rotunno could tell the audience about the characters and their relation to each other in the stills below from Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Rocco and His Brothers, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.
Of course, film imagery is even more impactful when the images move. To appreciate how intoxicating Rotunno’s cinematography could be, I recommend this brilliant video essay from Scout Tafoya on RogerEbert.com.
CARNAL KNOWLEDGETHE LEOPARDROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSALL THAT JAZZAMARCORD
This week, I recommend Sound of Metal (Amazon, included with Prime) and Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You (Netflix). I’ll be writing about both of them soon. Sound of Metal will be going on my list of Best Movies of 2020.
REMEMBRANCE
Christopher Plummer in KNIVES OUT
Christopher Plummer has died at age 91. I loved him in his Oscar-winning performance in Beginners and in 2019’s Knives Out. One of the great Shakespearean stage actors of his generation, Plummer’s TV and movie career, with its 372 screen credits, eclipses the adjective “prolific”. Plummer, of course is best known for that beloved movie that I despise (as did he for decades), The Sound of Music. Plummer elevated some fine movies in his supporting roles: The Man Who Would Be King, Jesus of Nazareth. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Here’s his NYT obit.
On February 15, Turner Classic Movies airs the romantic French musicalThe Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Innovative writer-director Jacques Demy had the actors sing all of the dialogue. Umbrellas is also notable for the breakout performance by then 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve; and an epilogue scene at a gas station – one of the great weepers in cinema history.
