Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Three more movies from Sundance
Sundance has returned as a full-fledged, in-person festival for those willing to make the climb to the upper elevations of Park City, Utah. Alas, I am unable to attend in person this year — a loss on many fronts, not the least of which, a chance to see old friends and spend quality time in the shadows of the beautiful Wasatch mountains — but that does not deter me from watching as many of this year’s selections as possible from the comfort of my own couch.
Continuing with the next batch of screenings from this year’s film festival, from a grab-bag of genres, including the adaptation of a super-viral literary short story; a noir-esque take on a well-regarded feminist novel; and the latest setto from one of our better chroniclers of white, upper-middle class angst.
“Cat Person”: When Kristen Roupenian’s short story appeared in The New Yorker back in 2017, it caused a buzz massive enough that for a brief, shining moment, an actual literary piece became a viral sensation. Tapping into the modern romantic zeitgeist, in which a vast majority of communication between perspective couples occurs online, leaving up for doubt just about everything in terms of real-world commingling, Roupenian’s story, about a college student who becomes briefly involved with an older man who proves deeply unscrupulous, added to that discomfort, the special double-jeopardy for women in this scenario, where one wrong turn could lead to lifetime of dread, or worse.
Susanna Fogel’s film, penned by Michelle Ashford, at first perfectly captures the story’s unease, its atmosphere of barely restrained dread, digging deeper into the characters to add richness and subtlety. Alas, about the time it runs out of text from Roupenian’s piece, it quickly spirals into a mishmash of outlandish violence
and misplayed motivations in its final act — it moves from figurative to literal, in a way that actually reduces the tension, letting the audience off the hook, essentially, and dulling its resonance.
It opens with a brutally telling quote from Margaret Atwood (“Men fear women will laugh at them; women fear men will kill them”), which sets the tone for the first couple of acts, as sunny college student Margot (Emilia Jones), working at a local rep cinema, meets older Robert (Nicholas Braun), as he comes in for screenings.
Over an extended digital courtship, they exchange funny, wry texts and memes before finally going on an actual date (he takes her to see “The Empire Strikes Back,” his very definition of romantic, which is a wickedly dead-on detail). After they very awkwardly sleep together (another brilliant innovation: as the gruesome action is taking place in his grotty bedroom, Ashford has Margot stage a running commentary with herself, standing some feet away, fully clothed, and totally disdainful), he becomes besotted, and she gets completely turned off.
Her friend Taylor (Geraldine Viswanathan) forces her hand to break things off digitally, but Robert persists, until things build into a regrettable, action-filled climax that feels as if from a different movie altogether ( none of which occurs in the story). It’s a tremendous shame to craft such a beguiling portrait of toxic man (“It’s pronounced ‘Haan,’’’ he curtly informs her after she mispronounces the name of the “Star Wars’’ hero), layering in the levels of fear and paranoia that women have to cope with on any such potential courtship, only to drop all its carefully crafted subtlety in favor of an over-the-top orgy of blood, flame and force.
“Eileen”: I think it’s maybe time for another Anne Hathaway reassessment: She’s gone from supremely talented star-inthe-making, to star, to thirsty award-digger, to marginalized afterthought, and now, as she has grown into full mature adulthood that has only enhanced her copious abilities, we can see an actress of sublime skill and range.
In William Oldroyd’s twisty, vintage noir-esque fable (based on the celebrated novel by Ottessa Moshfegh), she plays the stirring counterpoint to our heroine, the titular Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), a peculiar, unrealized young woman who works at the local men’s prison and cares for her aging, alcoholic father (Shea Whigham) — who shares with her various damning assessments, including, during one drunken stupor, referring to her as one of those people who you don’t even notice, “Take a penny, give a penny.”
She has very little life beyond her own, oddly hypersexualized inner one. When she first meets new prison psychologist Dr. Rebecca St. John (Hathaway), it’s very nearly love at first sight. Rebecca works in peculiar ways, very much dancing to her own drum, but with the beauty, Harvard education and moxie to live her life unbowed. Eileen begins to fantasize about her, especially after a wild night out at the bar, in which they share a lingering kiss, after she ends up passed out in her broken down car in a pool of her own vomit.
The story seems to have a recognizable trajectory — and not the first film to play at this year’s Sundance involving a miserable office worker redeemed by a new employee (“Sometimes I Think About Dying”) — but suddenly veers off into an altogether different direction, shortly after Rebecca invites Eileen over to her house for Christmas Eve.
Set on small town coastal Massachusetts in the wintertime, the film sports a suitably dingy, gray palette — it seems as if everyone other than our two lead protagonists has nothing but taupe and pale brown in their wardrobes — and uses its gamy viscerality to purposeful, if off-putting, effect (even the vomit Eileen wakes up in appears hauntingly realistic).
It’s almost as if there’s nothing beautiful here, with McKenzie severely toning down her vibrant looks, until Rebecca shows up in a flashy red coupe, her hair severely blonded and her force of personality mesmerizing to young Eileen. Not everything works precisely, especially when the film takes its unexpected turn, but much of the groundwork is excellent, allowing it a wider than usual sort of berth. It is interesting to see Hathaway use her star-power in this sort of way, almost self-referentially, with a character who equally seems to be sending the place up.
“You Hurt My Feelings”: Writer/ Director Nicole Holofcener’s storytelling style involves small snippets of scenes between characters — slices of life that might involve a pair of sisters volunteering for a church clothing giveaway; a woman meeting her mother at an old diner they used to frequent; a married couple sharing a quick dinner — that, individually, might seem low-key to the point of irrelevance. But collectively, these exquisitely rendered moments begin to form a much greater whole, creating a sense of the world for her characters that somehow expands far beyond what we actually see of them.
It’s an impressive sort of magic trick, the kind of thing (like Raymond Carver’s minimalist prose) that seems much easier to accomplish than it actually is. In keeping with the Carver idea, many of her characters — she tends to focus on upwardly mobile women living in big cities, whose lives are upended one way or the other, leaving them to deal with the fallout — are realistic to the point of near familiarity. We recognize them in a way that quickly becomes congenial.
In this film, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (previously in Holofcener’s wonderful “Enough Said” — her titles are often convexingly pedestrian) plays Beth, a writer whose memoir was published several years before, who’s struggling to complete a novel her agent doesn’t seem very enthused about.
Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist, whose patients (“My crazies,” he jokes) we also get to meet in the course of things, is ever supportive of his wife — it’s clear that they actually have a really strong marriage, lovingly exchanging anniversary gifts and doting over their 23-year-old son, Eliot (Owen Teague) — even though, as Beth unfortunately overhears at a sporting goods store as Don talks with his brother-inlaw, Mark (Arian Moayed), he doesn’t actually like the book.
This news hits the sensitive Beth like a flying roundhouse kick, leaving her staggering out of the store with her concerned sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins) in tow. Suddenly, her exemplary marriage is filled with rift and discord — the unwitting Don, having to deal with various cantankerous patients, attempts to find out what’s bothering his wife to no avail.
It sounds like the sort of set-up that will climax at a big party of some kind, where everything finally comes out into the open and all is resolved at the end, but Holofcener is after something considerably more nuanced than a simple misapprehension comedy. In marriages, the film suggests, what we do and don’t tell our partners can actually be much less important than how we feel about them in general (“My not liking your book doesn’t make me love you any less,” Don explains).
In a quiet, subtle way, the film breaks down the central difference between a loving couple and the miserable patient couple (Amber Tamblyn and David Cross) of Don’s, who attack each other relentlessly, even though they can’t imagine splitting up: Remaining open and vulnerable to each other seems to be imperative, even if it feels you’re risking everything to do so.