Low stakes can add up to success in movies
It was somewhere between Episode 8 of The Crown and Episode 92 of The Walking Dead when I asked my wife if we could just watch a movie. Following season after season of long form television, I wanted something simple: a story that would begin and end on the same bowl of popcorn.
You’ve no doubt heard that this is the golden age of television, and with good reason: technology has changed the way we interact with the format. We watch multiple episodes in one sitting, so each episode no longer dedicates time to recapping previous events. Market research has allowed showrunners and producers the confidence to think in multiple season long arcs. As a result, television has supplanted the film as the ultimate long form visual medium.
Films, on the other hand, have grown in their own way as well. While the constraints of the format place an upper limit on the length of a marketable film, the grandiosity feels like it’s increased. It could be thanks to the international market, where explosions translate better than whispered dialogue, but it’s probably just the maxim that bigger equals better in effect. For example, last year’s Star Wars sequel, The Force Awakens, follows A New Hope’s template, with the one major difference: the superweapon is no longer the size of a small moon, but an actual, slightly larger moon.
In film franchises, the universe keeps expanding and the stakes continue rising, but one can only see so many vortexes over Times Square at a film’s climax before they just don’t care anymore.
In 2016, the strain of ever bigger films and slowly burning, convoluted television was remedied by some films that reflected a yearning for smaller stories.
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, billed as the spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, told a story that takes place in one small town over the course of a single weekend. Linklater is a noted experimenter when it comes to the form of his films, but compared to 2014’s Boyhood and 2013’s Before Midnight, Everybody Wants Some!! was a refreshingly small story. Set on a southeast Texas college campus the weekend before classes start, Everybody Wants Some!! told the simple story of how a protagonist meets a girl. The stakes could not possibly be lower, but the film works for just that reason.
The secret was already out of the bag by the time most people saw 10 Cloverfield Lane, but this tight, claustrophobic thriller was the definition of small — that is until the end, when its tie in to a larger franchise was revealed. Until that point, though, the intimate interplay between John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher Jr. could have been written for the stage.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was a large film in scope, and a marketing decision by Disney to expand the Star Wars universe. So how could a film that takes place on half a dozen planets be called small when compared to the franchise that spawned it? There wasn’t as much on the line, as most viewers already had a good idea of what would happen.
Maybe the best example of the small film from 2016 was Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, a tight buddy comedy. It was refreshing to see a movie that ended in a hotel lobby, and whose only stakes were that if the heroes lose, the bad guys get away.
By the same token, I found myself gravitating to television legal and medical procedurals that I once looked down on. I now appreciate their small plots that don’t require devoted, or even regular viewing.
2016 saw a few great alternatives for folks who can’t wait seven seasons for a payoff and would sooner press hard on their eyelids to get the same effect.
Let’s hope for even more in the coming year.