A musical love letter to a fairytale version of Los Angeles

I relatively recently became a Los Angeleno, and among the many lessons I have learned since arriving is that the movies that taught me about L.A. are mostly bold, beautiful lies. I have long known that Hollywood is in the business of pablum, artifice and mythmaking; I’m a film critic, after all. But the extent of the fiction has only become clear to me as I’ve sat in traffic long to understand why road rage murder seems justified; I’ve witnessed the suffering of the city’s garish, inhumane poverty; I’ve met the people who write and direct and enact the lies. We believe the lies because the truth is too much to bear, and we tell the lies out of self-preservation as well as masochism. It seems fitting that as the country slouches toward fascism with a man empowered by reality television that the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture at the next Academy Awards is La La Land, a not-that-great musical love letter to a fairytale version of Los Angeles.

The film opens with a rewrite of the opening of Fellini’s 8 ½, in which Marcello Mastroianni’s anxious director is trapped in a haunting, terrifying black and white traffic jam. In La La Land, the traffic jam is in full, glorious color, and instead of writhing in agony as Mastroianni did, the drivers pop out of their cars and giddily perform “Another Day in the Sun,” a paean to up-from-your-bootstraps success in Los Angeles: “Behind these hills / I’m reaching for the heights / And chasing all the lights that shine / And when they let you down / You’ll get up off the ground / As morning rolls around / And it’s another day of sun.” It’s thrilling and funny and adorable, and, of course, a lie, since 99 percent of people who come to L.A. to be stars fail. But that’s not what La La Land is about. The movie is about wish fulfillment smothered in the gooey hooey that we sometimes call the American Dream.

At the end of the number, we zero in on two driver-dreamers, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling). After growing up on old Hollywood films like Casablanca and Bringing Up Baby, she wants to become an actress, and she’s damn good. A gifted jazz pianist, he’s obsessed with the romance of old school jazz and wants to open a club to preserve that music. They are fueled by nostalgia and pluck, and their courtship is, considering that Stone and Gosling have legendary chemistry, as endearing as any classic romance that Mia watched as a child. As they fall in love, they support each other’s ambitions, and then there are obstacles and fights, and of course song and dance.

Writer and director Damien Chazelle (of Whiplash fame) clearly followed Stephen Sondheim’s advice to hire actors who can sing, rather than singers who can act. Gosling more or less speaks his songs, and Stone dumbs down her actually good voice to match his skill level – until one song toward the end when she’s allowed to rip loose. Neither of them can dance particularly well. Their tap number is cute, but mostly because it reminds you of better dancing from the old Hollywood musicals that La La Land is repeatedly referencing. Justin Hurwitz’s songs and score are cheerful and optimistic, like the film, and they fit perfectly within Chazelle’s sun-soaked, color-saturated postcard shots of Griffith Park, Santa Monica and the Hollywood Hills.

However, with all of Chazelle’s grand aspirations and inspirations – to make something like a cross between Singing in the Rain and LA Story, I think – it’s odd how his scope narrows quickly after “Another Day in the Sun.” The cast is underpopulated, with supporting characters existing only to get Mia and Sebastian to talk when they aren’t together, and Los Angeles becomes a backdrop to a rather standard romance. Chazelle only stages two truly big numbers, the opening and the beautifully bittersweet closing, with the vast majority of the film overly intimate and seemingly muted for such a massive canvas. The film tells two lies, then: Los Angeles is a paradise of opportunity, and the movie is about Los Angeles.

La La Land
Written and Directed by Damien Chazelle
Starring Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and John Legend
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

Originally published in LGBT Weekly.

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A masterpiece of the genre

Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea

A few months ago, an acquaintance dismissed an entire swath of acclaimed American films as “sad white people movies.” In the sense that they are about various Caucasians who aren’t happy, sometimes for existential reasons and often for tragic ones; movies like In the Bedroom, The Savages, or Sideways are, yes, about sad white people. (You could also go back to Mildred Pierce, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Ordinary People). Not everyone likes to be challenged emotionally or intellectually in the movie theater, and there’s certainly a thread of whining in some of these movies.

But what these movies do, along with allied genres in the modern novel or on TV shows like Mad Men and Six Feet Under, is show us people who find their way through their grief, anguish, anger and fear. They don’t always do it elegantly or kindly, but the stories encourage a collective understanding and a broadening empathy, and they help us understand our own emotions. Manchester by the Sea, this year’s sad white people awards contender, is a masterpiece of the genre.

Kenneth Lonergan, whose two previous films You Can Count of Me and Margaret, are also sad white classics, writes about grief, family and love with great insight and humor, earning our tears and laughs rather than suckering us into giving them up. In Manchester by the Sea, his protagonist is Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a handyman who is suddenly shouldered with the responsibility of parenting his nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) after the expected but still agonizing death of Lee’s brother Joe (Kyle Chandler).

The sympathy for Lee is greater than for Patrick, because Lee has suffered more than anyone – and we don’t know why until his divorce from Randi (Michelle Williams) is explained. He doesn’t handle his sadness any better than the average person; he gets into fights when he’s not performing a stereotypical New England stoicism. Even though Lee is preternaturally a good father, his past makes him terrified and resistant, and when he discovers that Joe meant him to take care of Patrick, he balks. Patrick, a self-possessed, witty, girl-crazy 16-year-old, does his best to hold it all together, but he’s 16, and he’s been asked to handle a lot, what with a dead father and a missing, alcoholic mother (Gretchen Mol).

Lonergan is particularly adept at mixing a sarcastic wit with unflinching emotion, and his writing and direction in Manchester are as smoothly beautiful as they are emotionally pointed. Lonergan made Mark Ruffalo a star – first in the play This is Our Youth and then in You Can Count on Me – and Ruffalo’s mannered, naturalistic, open wound sort of acting is what Lonergan demands. Casey Affleck’s performance as Lee has less quirk, which makes him a better everyman; no one should have to experience what Lee has, and he manages as well as we would. When I cried (four different times), it was because I felt I knew Lee, hoped I could do as well as Lee, but wishing I never need to try.

Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea

Young Hedges, who has the dual challenges of Lonergan’s quick dialogue and numerous scenes with Affleck in full method mode, is flawless. Williams, arguably the great actress of her generation, has a beautiful, if wrenching scene toward the end of the film that makes her best moments in Brokeback Mountain seem as if they were done for a high school play. Williams excels at playing a sad white woman, and that is not to dismiss her, but to declare how essential she is to American film.

Manchester by the Sea

Written and Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Starring Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges and Michelle Williams

Rated R

At Landmark Hillcrest

Originally published in LGBT Weekly.

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SNL’s Chris Kelly makes a remarkable directorial debut

Jesse Plemons and Molly Shannon in Other People

The odd distribution plan for the exceptional Other People says a great deal about how film has changed with the advent of streaming services, especially in regards to independent film. In the past, movies with tiny budgets and niche audiences (especially gay ones) could only be found in art houses in large cities before showing up on video many months later. Other People opened in a handful of theaters in the United States Sept. 9 – and none were in San Diego – but it also became simultaneously available online to rent for half the price of one of the theater tickets. While the experience of seeing any movie in a theater is always preferable to seeing it on TV, Other People is not Gravity or The Tree of Life – it’s a comic drama set mostly in suburban Sacramento and the focus is on the writing, acting, and interpersonal emotions, not landscapes, special effects, and narrative sweep. Your TV is fine. And seeing it at home might be best when you’re in the midst of an ugly cry.

Other People, a hit at Sundance that closed Outfest in Los Angeles this summer, is the directorial debut of Saturday Night Live writer Chris Kelly. It is both funny enough to have left me with sore stomach muscles and sad enough to earn my own ugly tears. Based on his own experience dealing with his mother’s death, the film focuses on Kelly’s alter ego David (Jesse Plemons), a struggling comedy writer who returns home to Sacramento from New York after his mother Joanne (Molly Shannon) has been diagnosed with cancer. David has broken up with his long-term boyfriend Paul (Zach Woods) but doesn’t want to tell anyone in his family, not his mother who doesn’t need to worry about David and not his father Norman (Bradley Whitford) who can’t handle, or even speak of, David’s gayness. Joanne is fabulous and funny and she does her best to stay positive as her condition worsens. David, while helping his mother in every way he can, is wracked with self-loathing, doubt, early grieving and loneliness. When he can, he spends time with a childhood friend Gabe (John Early), whose little brother (J.J. Totah) is a precocious gay tween.

The film opens with Joanne’s death, so the ending is pre-determined, focusing the film on David and his relationships rather than on the tension of whether or not Joanne’s cancer will beat her. Kelly’s writing, both in his raw, off-kilter humor and his finely observed emotional realism, is exquisite, part Stephen Falk (You’re the Worst), part Andrew Haigh (Weekend), part Woody Allen. His direction is also striking, with smartly controlled, carefully detailed scenes featuring excellent performances from the leads, supporters and even cameos. Most notable is, of course, Molly Shannon’s truly great, Oscar-worthy performance as Joanne. It features her trademarked ebullience and enthusiasm, but she also is just as effective in subtle, quiet, raw moments as she is when she’s the life of the party. She’s brave, brilliant and devastating.

Jesse Plemons and Bradley Whitford are both fantastic, too. Plemons, perhaps with two too many ticks, is the rare gay lead without overly straight or stereotypical affectations; he’s a recognizable, complex, messy man. Whitford complicates the homophobic father, making him not a bigot, but instead limited and cloistered and simply ill-at-ease. In smaller roles, June Squib, John Early and particularly the outrageous Totah prevent even the short, filler scenes from slowing the film down. It’s a small film, but a remarkable one, worthy of the widest attention possible.

Other People

Written and directed by Chris Kelly

Starring Jesse Plemons, Molly Shannon and Bradley Whitford

Rated R

Available to rent and own on iTunes, Amazon and Google Play

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Author: The JT Leroy Story

Opens at Hillcrest Landmark Sept. 23

Twenty years ago, the it author of the moment – at least in avant garde, hipster, queer circles – was Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy, better known as JT Leroy. A teenage sex worker, vagrant and drug addict turned literary wunderkind, Leroy started publishing autobiographical stories in 1996, when he was 16. In 1999, he released two lyrical, dark and shocking books, the novel Sarah and the story collection The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, to immense acclaim. He had a following of major literary and arts figures, including novelists Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson, memorist Mary Karr and poet Sharon Olds and rockstars Shirley Manson of Garbage, Courtney Love of Hole and particularly Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins. But in 2005, several journalists figured out that Leroy didn’t exist. His writing was done by the much older San Franciscan Laura Alpert and his personal appearances made by Alpert’s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop. The scandal was bizarre and titillating and embarrassing for a number of people, and Jeff Feuerzeig’s fantastic documentary Author: The JT Leroy Story does the seeming impossible: makes sense of the whole thing.

Feuerzeig is both lucky and skilled. His subject is Alpert, who not only is unflinching in the recounting of her story, admitting every detail and explaining her practical and psychological reasoning, but she also kept everything. We are privy to her drawings, hand-written writings and the numerous recordings she kept of her conversations with everyone from Courtney Love to Dennis Cooper. Feuerzeig edited Alpert’s archives along with old press footage, amateur recordings and new interviews, creating a beautiful, seamless monument to fame, fiction, psychopathology and fraud. Author is an instructive history lesson, but it is also entertaining in a way that I never was able to find Leroy’s writing: it is funny and moving and, most importantly, true.

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

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Meryl Streep makes bad look good

Meryl Streep in Florence Foster Jenkins

Florence Foster Jenkins, who lived from 1868 to 1944, was an eccentric heiress who used her considerable financial resources to stage and promote her musical career. She needed to use her own money because, despite having as a child been somewhat of a piano-playing prodigy, she was a terrible singer, probably both tone and beat deaf (possibly because of advanced syphilis). With her common law husband St. Clair Bayfield as her manager, she self-produced and self-promoted small concerts for friends and acquaintances, most of whom thought her outrageous costumes and bizarre vocals were hilarious. But it seems she wasn’t in on the joke. She had no idea how bad she was until she had a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall in 1944 and legitimate critics came and savaged her. Devastated, she had a heart attack a week later and she died a month after that.

Stephen Frears’ charming, funny and moving biopic of Jenkins, written by Jenkins’ biographer Nicholas Martin, stars Meryl Streep as Florence, Hugh Grant as St. Clair and Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg as Cosmé McMoon, Florence’s accompanist. The film takes place during the last year of Florence’s life and condenses many events into a short period, all leading up to the Carnegie Hall performance. After seeing a particularly powerful performance by a famed soprano, Florence is inspired to sing again, after many years performing only tableau vivants and patronizing arts organizations. St. Clair helps her hire Cosmé and Carlo Edwards, a well-known vocal coach, to work with her. Cosmé is astonished by Florence’s lack of talent and St. Clair and Carlo’s dishonesty, but Florence is paying so well, he keeps playing for her. After rapturous applause following a small, private concert for her friend and glowing reviews paid for by St. Clair without her knowledge, Florence gains even more confidence. She makes a record and when St. Clair is out of town with his girlfriend (Rebecca Ferguson) – as he and Florence have an “understanding,” he says – Florence sends it to a radio host. The record is a hit and this leads to Carnegie Hall.

The film, as biopics do, simplifies a great deal. Florence is depicted as utterly clueless about her talent, or lack thereof, and St. Clair is carefully managing the world around her to protect her. While St. Clair clearly adores Florence, he is also profiting from her happiness, since he was never good enough an actor to have had a career leading to the lifestyle he led. In reality, St. Clair was a successful actor who worked constantly in supporting roles and was one of the founders of Actor’s Equity. And Florence seems to have been much more involved in protecting herself from critics, having written under pseudonyms some of the implausibly good reviews that appeared in the less reputable press. I think showing Florence as a slightly more cynical self-promoter would have made for a more interesting film, if a less sympathetic lead.

I’m sure the irony of the world’s greatest living actress playing a woman described (often) as “the world’s worst singer” was not lost on the producers of Florence Foster Jenkins. Streep is at her Streepiest in her unsubtle, mannered performance, and she’s delightful, not only when she’s singing badly and sporting ludicrous costumes, but particularly in her deeply sweet moments of doubt and vulnerability. Helberg’s broad comic performance provides the eye-popping double takes needed to signal the audience that we’re supposed to laugh. But the film’s hero is Hugh Grant, giving the best performance of his career as an oddly devoted husband in an impossibly weird marriage.

Florence Foster Jenkins

Directed by Stephen Frears

Written by Nicholas Martin

Starring Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, and Simon Helberg

Rated PG-13

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

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Hang on for the ride in this insanely surreal comedy-drama

Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe in Swiss Army Man

As we were walking into Swiss Army Man, I discovered that my friend Adam, who I’d brought to the movie, didn’t know anything about what we were about to see. I giggled, because I knew that the movie was about a guy stranded on a deserted island who befriends a farting corpse. Adam was going to be very surprised. Ten minutes into the film, he whispered, “What the hell? This is like Weekend at Bernie’s.” To which I responded, “Crossed with Castaway!” But the film is a lot more than being the bastard child of a low-rent ‘80s comedy about two men who cart around the dead body of their boss claiming he’s alive and a high-brow Tom Hanks drama about survival and the meaning of life. Yes, it’s as bizarre and puerile as Bernie’s and aspires to Castaway’s depth; Swiss Army Man uses the insanity of its premise to create a powerfully symbolic fever dream about the power of friendship to heal the wounds of a lifetime of loneliness.

 

The film opens with a disheveled, dejected Hank, played by a brilliantly sensitive Paul Dano, alone on a small island in the middle of the ocean, where he is setting up a ramshackle noose with which to hang himself. As he is getting the courage to commit suicide, he sees a man wash ashore. He almost kills himself rushing to the figure, who turns out to be both dead and played by Daniel Radcliffe (continuously ballsy in his post-Harry Potter choices). Depressed once again, Hank almost goes through with the hanging before he notices something odd about the corpse: it’s farting, and it’s farting a great deal. In fact, its farts are so powerful that they can propel the body like a jet ski. The opening credits roll as Hank rides the corpse across the waves and swells, screaming in joy. (This is when I looked over at Adam and saw his jaw drop.)

Hank wakes up on the shore of what looks like the mainland. He has become emotionally attached to his corpse, so he drags it behind him as he wanders through the garbage-strewn forest, searching for water and food and civilization – and the object of Hank’s affection, played mostly in flashback by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. One morning, desperately thirsty, he discovers that in addition to being a fart engine, the corpse is also a water pump – push his stomach and seemingly clean water spouts from his mouth. And then the corpse wakes up. Because at this point, why not? He can’t really move and can only barely talk and remembers nothing of being alive, but he takes the name Manny and joins Hank on his mission. As Hank teaches him about manners (like not farting in front of people) and women (which leads to Manny’s nearly magical erections), they become epically close friends.

Writer-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert were best known prior for their insane, ground-breaking, and now iconic video for Turn Down the What, which has been seen over 500 million times on YouTube. Swiss Army Man is their first narrative feature, and it takes their bonkers and quite original aesthetic and wraps it around a somewhat traditional buddy comedy. In some ways, the script, which is often as sweet as it is ribald, goes to expected places, and then it veers into places where I was shocked to arrive. I was moved but I was also disappointed when the Daniels’ (as they’re known) didn’t fully embrace the queerness that they worked hard to set up. I think most viewers who sat through the whole film will cheer the ending, but I was left a little dejected by the Daniels’ embrace of traditional heterosexism in a film as deliriously iconoclastic as Swiss Army Man.

Swiss Army Man

Written and Directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe and Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Rated R

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

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