A Movie Shot From 2016 To Go Home With You

Kelly Reichardt has always opted for minimal narratives and sparse dialogue, preferring to tell her stories through mood, frames and faces. 2016’s “Certain Women” was no different. Telling three different stories of three different women, she begins with a little plot in the first story, hacks away a bit more plot in the second, and leaves us with next to nothing in the last, making Lily Gladstone’s face the preeminent star of the show. Playing a lonely rancher, so isolated from anyone else that she walks into some class she’s never been to for something she’s unfamiliar with, just to hear other people talk. That includes the instructor Beth (Kristen Stewart), who drives all the way in from Livingston, a few hours away, and becomes, unwittingly, the object of the rancher’s affection. The rancher, however, is too timid to really explain how she feels and Beth is too distracted to deduce how the rancher feels and so the whole thing, despite a few brief meals and conversations, just sort of sits there in a holding pattern.

When Beth quits the class, the rancher hops in her truck and drives to Livingston, without an explanation, because who’s she gonna tell? It’s just her, which is made that much more apparent when she arrives in Livingston, she walks the nighttime streets, hands in her coat pockets, silently, peering into windows, a daydream grin on her face, because to her these windows may as well be the holiday window displays at department stores in New York City.

Another director might have cut this sequence. Isn’t she here to see Beth? What does this have to do with anything? But Reichardt knows one shot can explicate volumes. And as the rancher strolls by some warmly lit cafe, peering in, the framing lets you feel both the curiosity and the distance.

The rancher is always outside looking in.

Two Best Non-Performances of 2016

2016 was a fierce year for documentaries. After all, a pair of ‘em made my Top 10, and several more easily could have, and within those documentaries were personalities as captivating as any feature film. Two personalities, however, stood above the rest, as memorable to me as any character in any film, one raw and open, the other inscrutable and yet, somehow, simultaneously eerily inviting.

Ron Shipp, “O.J. Made in America”

The immense scope of Ezra Edelman’s “O.J. Made in America”, turning the O.J. Simpson murder trial into a treatise on race and celebrity and policing in America, amongst other things, allowed for a gallery of memorable talking heads. No talking head, however, moved me more than Ron Shipp, a former Los Angeles Police Officer and friend and confidante to Simpson. There were, as the doc shows, a lot of people who willingly turned a blind eye to the truth about O.J., and who still turn a blind eye to it, or refuse to concede how or why they turned a blind eye to it then. There are lawyers, so many lawyers, many of whom are the sort who, while arrogantly demanding straight answers from people who under oath, duck, dodge and evade when pressed by Edelman. There is O.J.’s former agent, who seems to fancy himself as a truth-teller when it’s clear that when it really mattered he was merely a yes man. And then there’s Ron Shipp. He confesses how Simpson’s charming false front initially obscured what was really going with O.J. and Nicole, only to nobly change tunes when the truth made itself evident, to stand up for Nicole when so many others receded into the shadows. Shipp, you can tell, really thought he and O.J. were friends, which makes his trial testimony, in which Simpson’s defense team launches an all-out character assassination on Shipp, so gut-wrenching. And watching archival footage of Shipp on the witness stand, a supporting character in an epic morality play, his incredulousness giving way to anger, is to understand that no matter what blarney they pitch you in manners camp, the cost of doing the right thing can be terribly steep.  

Huma Abedin, “Weiner”

The image above is “Weiner” in capsule. As the titular one-time NYC senator re-watches his appearance on a talk show, which he thinks he nailed even though he very much did not, drunk on his own image, his wife, Huma Abedin, cannot even bear to look, attempting to remain above the fray even though she knows by remaining attached to her husband so shall she remained attatched to his ever-lewd fray. This is not merely an emblem for the perils of politics; this is an emblem for the perils of monogamy; this is an emblem for the perils of technology; this is an emblem for the perils of narcissism. And of all the angles that “Weiner” plays none becomes more compelling than the gradual splintering of Anthony and Huma, played out in frames where she reveals next to nothing with words but everything with expressions, whether transforming eating a slice of pizza into an evocation of all the sorrow in the world or looking down at her spouse where he sits with disdain so ruthless he can look only past her and out the window. And if he drowns in his all his own figuratively pungent desperation, she separates herself, her formidable if oft-silent presence slowly dwindling from the documentary, letting him stew in the mess he has made. Politics is a business where, more often than not, people wind up like Weiner himself, with his tail between his legs, even if he doesn’t know it. Huma, on the other hand, as this shot illustrates, can still hold her head high.

The 12th Annual Prigges: A Few Performances From 2016 That I Loved

Each and every year at the movies is stacked with great performances and 2016 was no exception. Young, old, male, female, great movie, good movie, so-so movie, they came from everywhere. These are the ten performances from the year in movies that I most dearly loved. They are not numerically ranked but are still, more or less, set in descending order of my love.

Sarah Paulson, “Blue Jay.” Playing a character who runs into an old, significant flame (Mark Duplass), Paulson’s performance is one of immense physicality. When she and her ex go to a convenience store to get a six-pack to, perhaps, make conversation more bearable, Paulson edges ever so subtly closer to Duplass, looking at him not like she’s seeing him again for the first time but like she can’t believe she’s seeing him again at all. She fills out her entire performance with these little tics, growing more comfortable in his presence the further down the nostalgic rabbit hole they plunge, seizing on a key cassette tape of their past and declaring in a voice that is nearer a time machine than any sci-fi lit: “The winds of change are fucking blowing tonight.” No matter how far they take their eventual role-playing, Paulson keeps a few toes tethered to her real life she’s simultaneously trying to push away, until the conclusion, that is, when she is suddenly forced to revert. Her most heartbreaking facial expressions are the final ones, depressed dumbfoundness at having just fallen with an unalterable thud through the trapdoor of reality.

Ralph Fiennes, “A Bigger Splash.” Like a hurricane might be a cliched phrase but, really, seriously, people, Ralph Fiennes in “A Bigger Splash” is like a hurricane. A rock 'n' roll producer who interrupts the holiday of his one-time flame, he enters the film mid-conversation, kicking up a fuss into a telephone in a full speed ahead speaking pattern that suggests a short circuit in his larynx has literally made it so he can't shut up. He can, of course, but Fiennes plays the part with eyes twitching to speak when he's not speaking. And if it’s all too much, it’s also strangely never enough, which is what Fiennes play to in the part, a man clawing at the oxygen in the air with his every move and word like he can’t get enough. You’re never sure anyone else in the movie actually likes him, but you know he doesn’t care. You don’t care either. He’s the life of the party.

Michael Shannon, “Elvis & Nixon.” How do you play Elvis Presley? Lord, how many ways can that go wrong? And it is not that Shannon forgoes an impersonation of Elvis, because he kind of does do an impersonation of Elvis, and a deliberately less than stellar one, choosing, brilliantly, to play The King as The King, a man who has bought into but also, at the same time, become tired of his own myth. This is Elvis long after Ed Sullivan.

Michael Shannon, “Nocturnal Animals.” As a small town Texas detective in a fictional story within a story, Shannon outfits his part with more soul and bite than any other character in an often glam version of a B movie, downplaying his tragic reveal by meeting it with a doomed shrug, and playing the murder investigation more as a sizing up of the person he is helping, seeing if this person is willing to do what needs to be done to achieve, shall we say, real justice.

Kate Beckinsale, “Love & Friendship.” Joy of performance, George C. Scott used to call it, and Kate Bekinsale as Whit Stillman’s version of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan who is like two levels of Joy of Performance. Because Beckinsale gets to have fun in character as a woman essentially giving a performance with myriad variations in order to get every male, handsome, dumb, or both, all around her to do her bidding, but also because Beckinsale herself, eternally underused or misused as an actress, is clearly getting an absolute kick out of the opportunity to sink into her teeth into the role of a lifetime.

Trevante Rhodes, “Moonlight.” Assuming the part of the film’s main character after two other actors have already played the part at earlier stages in his life, Rhodes represses the immense baggage and frustrations we have seen established in the role even as he simultaneously allows that baggage and those frustrations to randomly, quietly surface, like bubbles in a pond.

Glen Powell, “Everybody Wants Some!!” It requires immense skill to both blend into and stand out from the ensemble, but Powell pulls the trick as Finn, self-appointed captain of a gang of 70s-era bros with a philosophy in, like, you know, life, man. His energy, in fact, reminds me of Fiennes in “A Bigger Splash”  except that instead of driving you insane, he eventually reels you in, not forcing you to see the world through his eyes but pushing you - hard, if need be - to see the world through yours.

Lily Gladstone, “Certain Women.” While Gladstone has her nameless, isolated, recalcitrant rancher go about her daily routine with great physical serenity, she informs every encounter with a young lawyer (Kristen Stewart) on whom she has a crush with warmly curious timidity. And in her final sequence, when tasked with offering a doomed confessional, she is already markedly emotionally retreating before she even makes it to the end.

Addison Timlin, “Little Sister.” As an ex-goth turned aspirant nun, Timlin avoids playing too hard at the dichotomy to find a middle ground instead, evincing how a brief dalliance with her past life allows for the last spurt of necessary spiritual growth, quietly suggesting that differing subcultures can nonetheless humanistically merge. In Timlin’s able hands, there is no dividing line between Siouxsie Sioux and Mother Theresa.

Ralph Fiennes, “Hail, Caesar!” Not much more than a glorified cameo, Fiennes still provides his role of a highbred Hollywood director struggling to coax a performance out of a simpleminded cowpoke so much ruffled pomposity that his performance was the funniest thing I saw at a movie in 2016.

The 12th Annual Prigges: My 10 Favorite Movies of 2016

As always, this is an eclectic list but, as always, these were the ten best movies I saw in 2016 regardless of genre, budget, box office, critical/audience consensus, or ‘importance’. (Click on the title to read the review.)

10. Paths of the Soul. Zhang Yang’s documentary chronicling a journey in which Tibetan pilgrims kowtow 1,200 miles through the mountains to the holy city intrinsically becomes less about a journey to the place itself than one to find inner peace, conveyed in a lyrically observational fashion in which the repetition of the kowtowing gradually allows for the pilgrims’ emergent meditative serenity to also take hold on the viewer.

9. Jackie / 8. Krisha. Though Pablo Larraín’s Jackie is a historical drama, based on very real events, obviously, it nonetheless feels like historical fantasy anyway, like the movie’s Jackie Kennedy, played by Natalie Portman with icy precision, is wresting control of a wannabe biopic in real time, re-making it on her own terms, shrouding it in myth and telling her story the way she wants it to be told. Krisha, meanwhile, though fictional, is based on real events, per director Trey Edward Shults, and stars his own family members, including Krisha Fairchild as the titular estranged family member returning home for Thanksgiving. She struggles mightily to re-claim her own narrative, but can't do it, falling prey to her own worst impulses, exuding a life of chaos that long ago fell out of her control.

7. Weiner. If directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg had hoped to chronicle the resurrection of a disgraced politician, what they found instead was that politician’s descent into even deeper psychological murk, done in by his own craven desire of needing to be seen, where narcissism and technology make for a destructive combination, leaving the ones closest to him without a voice, forever on the periphery, the political truly rendered as the personal.

6. Paterson. Jim Jarmusch’s loving paean to the Everyday is so unassuming that only when it ends and the spell is broken do you realize that the whole thing was magic.

5. Blue Jay. Not for nothing did this lo-fi yet pristine black & white indie contain the best performance of the year (Sarah Paulson). Alex Lehmann's film centers around the idea of performance, catching up with two teenage sweethearts who imagined their adult selves when they were young and now seek to imagine an alternate reality where they wound up together. And while its tone is one of wistfulness, it quietly allows dread to encroach and then explode, tearing down the foundation of performance and leaving behind nothing but the smoking crater of reality.

4. The Treasure. Director Corneliu Porumboui filters a search for buried treasure through the rigid aesthetic common to the Romanian New Wave, mixing up the solemn and the storybook and finding the perfect balance between the two, where one man's quest to do right by his family quietly opens up into something more, and where hope feels less pre-ordained than authentic and earned.

3. Certain Women. Set principally in the remote wilderness of Montana, the setting of Kelly Reichardt's latest ode to resplendent minimalism is paramount. “Certain Women” tracks three separate stories of three separate women who are nonetheless cosmically united by the isolation they endure, whether surrounded by people or not. Each one tries to find her own way in, but Reichardt, never beholden to obvious conclusions, settles for elliptical, yet no less emotionally true observations instead. Like the train in the film's scene-setting shot, life, no matter how much it might confuse and disappoint, just keeps rolling on by.

2. Moonlight. Director Barry Jenkins charts the life of one gay African-American through three different stages, from pre-teen to teen to adult, illustrating how the specific constraints of a society into which someone is cast can prevent him not simply from being what he wants to be but simply existing as who he is.

1. Everybody Wants Some!! Only a movie so tightly controlled could play so loose, a testament to writer/director Richard Linklater, as well as editor Sandra Adair, who craft a nearly flawless ode to the last lazy weekend before the new start of a freshman’s first semester at college. The film airdrops us into an extremely specific setting, that of ferocious male bonding, where ball busting is the native tongue and learning to give as good as you get is necessary for survival. Though do not presume that “Everybody Wants Some!!” is merely the latest visit to the frequent white male movie milieu. On the contrary, for all the machismo, this becomes an exploration of other cultural environments on campus, with the band’s good-hearted leader, Finn (Glen Powell), establishing himself as their semi-scholarly tour guide, espousing the necessity of opening one’s mind as he leads incursions into campus bars and parties where jockstraps are not the norm. Indeed, if “Everybody Wants Some!!” can be as crude as any campus comedy, it is never feebleminded, a sneak attack of sincerity and wisdom that acts its age.