Trump’s influence on film has been a very good thing
We don’t talk a whole lot about class in America, where we prefer to pretend that we transcend such distinctions. But in 2017, American movies had that conversation, bluntly and hauntingly, and if you spent the holiday season catching up on the crop of Oscar-minded fare, you visited unpolished places. You met unsatisfied people.
They spoke of being trapped on the wrong side of the tracks (“Lady Bird”) or in the wrong sorts of clothes (“I, Tonya”). They tried to paint over their despair, as if a thick enough coat of a bright enough pastel could keep the disappointment at bay (“The Florida Project”). They went to creative, even absurd lengths so that their voices might be heard (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”).
I can’t think of a previous batch of statuette contenders so politically on point and of the moment, and I credit — although that’s not quite the right word — Donald Trump.
His rise and presidency have brought so many of the cancers of American life to the surface, where we can no longer avoid them, and the movies reflect that. He’ll be at the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards not just as the butt of jokes. He’ll be there as an inspiration.
The themes of the Trump era are the themes of these movies. For racial anxiety, enter the nightmare of “Get Out,” is on many best-of-2017 lists.
For the tense relationship between the federal government and the media, see “The Post.” “All the Money in the World” presents a self-infatuated plutocrat whose obsession with riches deadens his soul. He is J. Paul Getty, but he may remind you of someone else.
Put these movies together and you have a cinematic syllabus for a course on America right now. All the messes and the monsters are accounted for. And Hollywood, thank heavens, is looking outward when that’s most important.
Part of what it’s seeing is the special burden that women bear and the particular powerlessness that they feel. That’s front and center in “The Florida Project,” whose downand-out mothers rear children without help from fathers and survive economically by sexually subjugating themselves. In “Three Billboards,” Frances McDormand’s character, demanding justice for her murdered daughter, won’t let the police, the Catholic priest and other patriarchs in her small town shoo her away. In “The Post,” Meryl Streep’s Katharine Graham muscles through a scrum of insistent and often patronizing men to claim her role as the decider. It’s a tale of awakening — and a fitting punctuation mark for a year in which so many women broke their silence.
I happened to see “I, Tonya” right after “Lady Bird” and was struck by their shared preoccupation with the self-consciousness, even shame, that Americans who struggle financially are sometimes made to feel. If Tonya Harding broke the rules, well, they were rigged against her, or so implies the movie.
“Lady Bird” was written and directed by a 34-year-old woman (Greta Gerwig) and “Get Out” by a 38-year-old black man ( Jordan Peele).
Like “Moonlight,” which rightly upset “La La Land” to win the best picture Oscar last time around, they’re what happens when the pipeline isn’t so conventional and opportunity so cinched. They’re truer to America, which certainly needs the truth.