Looking for ourselves in Looking

The afternoon of the day that HBO’s Looking premiered, the influential gay critic Alonso Duralde posted on Facebook, “Tonight is the premiere of LOOKING. The this-doesn’t-reflect-my-specific-queer-experience-so-boo-hoo-the-hell-with-it backlash is already in progress.” The producers and publicists of Looking, a half-hour dramedy about three gay men looking for love and sex in San Francisco, have generated so much hype in the gay press and the gay ghettos of social media that they quickly and unintentionally also generated an anti-hype machine. Almost immediately after hopeful articles appeared suggesting Looking might be as zeitgeist-defining for gay men as Girls was for young, urban women, the backlash began. Before anyone had seen an episode of the show, when all that was offered was thirty-second trailers and billboards in the real-life gay ghettos, people complained that it would too white, too shallow, too tame, not enough like Queer as Folk, too much like Queer as Folk. Praise often generates criticism, if only because contrarians exist and no aesthetic opinion has ever been universal, but I think something more specific is behind the arguments about Looking. Gay men rarely see accurate depictions of themselves reflected outside alternative, independent media, and when something like Looking deigns to represent their lives, gay men argue about what their lives are and what they should be.

Looking is written by the somewhat unknown Michael Lannan but directed by Andrew Haigh, who was responsible for Weekend, one of the most lauded gay films since Brokeback Mountain. Weekend was a naturalistic, emotionally and physically raw examination of modern gay lust and love, and Haigh’s involvement in Looking has a great deal to do with its pre-premier hype. And the first episode of Looking looked and felt like Weekend, complete with slightly jagged hand-held photography, gorgeous and seemingly natural light, and dialogue quick-edited into impressionistic snippets rather than linear conversations. While the opening scene featured both a furtive, aborted hook-up in a wooded park and a much less awkward threesome, the sex in Looking is not as daring or as explicit as it was in Weekend, or for that matter, Queer as Folk.

Otherwise, I could not tell whether the show could be as transformative or as disappointing as hoped or feared. There’s not much characterization or plotting you can do in 29 minutes, especially when tone and atmosphere are as important to Lannan and Haigh as story or backstory. We do know that 29-year-old Patrick (Jonathan Groff, best known for Glee and Spring Awakening) is single and doesn’t want to be and gets nervous and awkward when meeting men. Dom (Murray Bartlett), who is older and chiseled and full of swagger, is a direction-less waiter who until this episode has never been rejected by a man he was interested in. Bearded Augustín (Frankie J. Alvarez) decides to move in with his boyfriend, and then he promptly initiates a threesome with a co-worker. The humor is light and wry, the drama slow and subtle; the emotion comes from what is not said, from glances, expressions, and meaningful silence.
Looking is the anti-Girls, which is all about narcissistic, consciously witty monologues; whereas Girls is lily-white and as stagey as Woody Allen, every moment in the much more racially diverse Looking is meant to be as believable as hidden camera documentary. And unlike Girls, whose protagonist is a completely normal woman who has both typically and atypically pretty friends, Looking features one nearly perfect-looking man after another, men who seem only to be interested in men like themselves.

Herein lies the conflict and contention. I doubt too many viewers would claim that the problems of dating, mating, and monogamy are foreign from the actual gay experience. And I know groups of friends who are strangely, if not uniformly, young and attractive; Patrick, Dom, and Augustín do happen. But most gay men do not experience their lives like the men in Looking. They either aspire to these lives and looks or they are focused on something else completely. The majority do the latter: they’re suburban dads, small city bears, genderqueer kids who can’t and don’t imagine themselves living in the Castro. If there were multiple depictions of gay men on national television, I doubt few people would be angry about Looking. But most gay characters on television are witty sidekicks consciously constructed to play well in Peoria. For example, very little about Mitchell and Cam on Modern Family rings true, even if they’re funny and probably great for the cause.

Looking is the first major American television series to treat gay men like living, breathing human beings. And no human being, no three human beings, can represent an entire community or culture. Haigh recently told The Atlantic, “It never was our intention to be the ultimate gay show about all gay people. We just want to tell the stories of these characters and their lives.” But when there are so few shows with gay characters and only one with believable gay protagonists, that one will seem like it is trying to be that ultimate, and that one will disappoint, even anger the people who don’t identify with its characters. This is not the fault of Lannan, Haigh, or HBO; it’s a problem with the larger heterosexist culture, one that we all have to work to change.

Looking
Episode 1: “Looking for Now”
Written by Michael Lannan
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Starring Jonathan Groff, Frankie J. Alvarez, and Murray Bartlett
Looking airs Sunday nights on HBO, starting January 20.

His computer’s voice is Her

Her 1

Two years ago, Apple introduced Siri, a program for their iPhones that acts like a personal assistant, complete with a female voice. You talk to it, it talks back, and the famous advertisements featured conversations between celebrities and Siri made her seem, well, intelligent. Anyone who has used Siri knows Siri isn’t as helpful as advertised and or all that smart, but in Her, Spike Jonze’s astonishing and moving masterpiece, the personal assistant program that Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) buys on a lark is not just helpful and smart, but intuitive and, most importantly, emotional.

The surprisingly real artificial intelligence is a science fiction trope that has been mined many times, most profoundly in Blade Runner and AI, but usually these stories focus on the program’s development of sentience and the horrid consequences therein. Her, however, does something very different by exploring what happens when a human and an artificial intelligence fall in love.

Not far in the future, Theodore works at a company that produces handwritten letters for clients; Theodore writes love letters for couples, missives from parents to children, thank you notes. The irony is readily apparent: While he writes deeply and beautifully emotional words for others, Theodore is depressed, isolated, and not in touch with or much aware of his own emotions. He has recently split with his wife (Rooney Mara), with whom he had a tortured, angry relationship.

After a particularly sad failed blind date, he comes across a display for a new artificially intelligent personal assistant. After he installs it, a female voice emanates from his computer and introduces herself as Samantha, who is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. She doesn’t sound like Siri, but rather like a human woman who lives inside a computer or a phone. She is warm, funny, devoted to Theodore, and, surprising for a computer program, she has free will. They fall in love, and since Samantha is only a voice and has a life on the internet that Theodore cannot see, complications ensue.

The plot seemed almost silly when I first heard about it, but Spike Jonze’s script gives Theodore and Samantha such a complex, sweet, and difficult relationship, the odd conceit of the film is quickly subsumed by a profound romance. It also helps that Jonze has created such a complete world of the near future, a world as complete as those in Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are. The art direction, which focuses on pastels and soft postmodern architecture, is beautifully shot by the great cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema. It’s one of the most beautiful visions of the future I’ve seen on film.

As much as Her is about Spike Jonze’s genius, it is also a vehicle for Joaquin Phoenix’s incredible talents. After his intensely dark turn in The Master, seeing him as Theodore, who is sweet, sensitive, very much in love, and nearly heroic in his emotional journey, is a revelation. I always assumed that Phoenix’s characters would always be some shade of creepy; even his Johnny Cash was rather unnerving. But Theodore is the sort character Tom Hanks used to play. Phoenix, however, seems perfectly cast, even if it’s a surprising role. He is becoming the great actor of his generation.

Her
Written and Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, and Amy Adams
Rated R
At your local multiplex

The Westons are a hurricane

August Osage CountyIn 2008, Tracy Letts’s three-and-a-half hour comic tragedy August: Osage County won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play, and it was considered one of the theatrical events of the first decade of the century. Transforming the play into a film was a no-brainer, but whittling three-and-a-half hours to a more cinematically appropriate two and recasting box office draws is not a no-brainer; it’s hard. And for some reason, the great TV producer John Wells, who had never directed a film before and certainly not such a prestige picture, was picked to helm this process. I’m not sure if anyone could have successfully made the transition (except maybe Mike Nichols), but Wells was clearly overwhelmed by the task of working with Letts’s adaptation and a nearly pyrotechnic cast. The movie is a searing, funny potboiler, but if you’ve never seen the play (as I have not), it’s hard to imagine how this movie could have come from the great dramas of recent memory.

In the heat of August in Oklahoma, the poet patriarch of the Weston family Beverly (Sam Shepard) goes missing and his children and their spouses come to the house to help their cancer-ridden, drug-addled mother Violet (Meryl Streep). There are three daughters, bitter Barbara (Julia Roberts), who moved away with her husband Bill (Ewan McGregor); put-upon Ivy, who stayed (Julianne Nicholson); and seemingly shallow Karen (Juliet Lewis), who also left Oklahoma, but unlike Barbara was not missed. Violet’s loud, busy sister Mattie (Margo Martindale) and her kind, slow-spoken husband Charlie (Chris Cooper) also come, and eventually so does their son, the supposed loser Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch).

This is an angry, damaged, and extremely dysfunctional family, and after Beverly is found dead, the festering conflicts explode: Barbara and Bill are separated and everyone finds out; their daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin) is sullen and precocious; Ivy and Little Charles are having a secret affair; Karen had brought her fiancé, the caddish Steve (Dermot Mulroney); Mattie and Charlie are failing to hold it all together; Violet is angry at all of them, particularly Barbara and Beverly, and she has no filter, no control, a lot of cigarettes, Jackie O. sunglasses, and a fabulous wig.

As these characters tumble towards a series of rather astonishing, rather appalling, and narratively unearned climaxes, it’s easy to see why all of these actors signed up for the movie. Every role is juicy, full of dark emotions and caustic words, and they all seem to be having a good time. All except for Julianne Nicholson, who plays perhaps the only true tragic figure in the story, and her subtlety and control and perpetual sadness make her work quite remarkable up against, particularly, Roberts and Streep. Roberts does some of her best work at Barbara, even if it is as caustic as anything she’s ever done. Barbara is not happy woman.

This is not surprising considering her mother is Violet, who is part Cruella de Vil, part Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, part Mommie Dearest. While she was nominated for a Golden Globe, along with Roberts, Streep’s performance as Violet is one of her worst. She’s uncharacteristically unhinged, chewing up her children and the scenery, ranting and raving with much more energy than a dying sedative addict would have. With Violet as the heart of the film, Wells’s direction of Streep should have been much more restrained, believable. But instead, Streep is personified chaos. I can see the reasoning behind that choice, since the Westons are a hurricane.

August: Osage County
Directed by John Wells
Written by Tracy Letts
Starring Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, and Margo Martindale
Rated R
At your local multiplex

Amoral and offensive and disgusting

Wolf of Wall StreetA couple weeks ago, a woman named Christina McDowell published a scathing essay in LA Weekly attacking The Wolf of Wall Street, its director Martin Scorsese, and its star Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie, a three-hour orgiastic comedy about Wall Street con men, is based on actual events, and McDowell is the daughter of one of the men who was ruined by the film’s hero, Jordan Belfort. While reciting the litany of the horrible things that happened to her and her family because of Belfort and his ilk, McDowell writes that the film recklessly glamorizes criminals and degrades women.

When I first read her essay, I found it self-serving, full of nostalgia for her years as the daughter of the filthy and illegally rich, and, like so many similar essays written by people tangential to events in based-on-a-true-story movies (re: Dallas Buyers Club, Zero Dark Thirty, The Fifth Estate), more about her sadness than the veracity of the film. Whether or not the events in the film actually happened, and it seems, many of them did, McDowell is right about a few things. The Wolf of Wall Street is amoral and offensive and disgusting, which isn’t to say it’s not often very funny, occasionally brilliantly acted, or full of rich, inventive Scorsesian style.

The movie is based on the book of the same name written by Belfort and it tracks his rise and fall as an ethically impaired, drug addicted, pathologically narcissistic penny stock trader. According to several accounts, the film is pretty faithful to the Belfort’s book, but Belfort’s former best friend and business partner Donnie Porush has said that the book “is a distant relative of the truth, and the film is a distant relative of the book.” However, the FBI agent who followed Belfort for 10 years said that everything Belfort wrote was true. If even half of what happens on screen actually happened, it’s beggars belief. The criminal activity is clearly believable, since we accept it as a given that if you’ve made a killing on Wall Street, you’ve probably done something wrong.

We watch Belfort (DiCaprio at his smarmy best), Porush (renamed Azoff, and played by a revoltingly funny Jonah Hill), and their cronies become obscenely wealthy by doing all sorts of illegal things while buying stocks at low prices and selling them at artificially high prices. (What we don’t see: Their investors losing virtually of all their money.) And they spend as much time doing coke, Quaaludes, and prostitutes as they do cheating their clients. Belfort crashes cars, sinks boats, and treats both his first (Teresa, played by Cristin Milioti) and second (Naomi, played by Margot Robbie) wives like dirt, and sometimes worse than dirt.

It’s three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and saying “fuck” more times than in any other film made in the United States. Screenwriter Terence Winter writes almost all of it as comedy, and much of it is very, very funny. Some of it is great slapstick, some of it is great irony, but a great deal of it is funny only because laughter prevents you from being as horrified and as nauseated as you should be. Winter has claimed that he wrote Belfort as an unreliable narrator and that we’re not supposed to believe, like, or approve of him, but almost nothing that Scorsese does with filming Winter’s words gives the audience reason to doubt either Belfort’s stories or his charm. (And DiCaprio’s videotaped adulation of Belfort as “a shining example of the transformative qualities of ambition and hard work” makes it pretty clear how much he was suckered by Belfort’s charisma.)

Scorsese responded to the criticism of McDowell and others, claiming, “If anyone watches this movie, at the end of Wolf of Wall Street, they’re going to see that we’re not at all condoning this behavior.” At the end, Belfort is shown playing tennis while in prison and then, free and easy and smug, working as a motivational speaker. Nowhere are we told that he has paid barely any of the mandated $110 million in restitution. We never see one of his victims. We don’t even see the effects of Belfort’s rape and beating of Naomi. Like Belfort’s victims, the women in The Wolf of Wall Street are only there as plot devices and comic foils, to screw and leave behind.

The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Terence Winter
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Margot Robbie
Rated R – very, very R
At your local multiplex