Hear me out: why The Paperboy isn’t a bad movie
To begin, a confession of professional negligence: I wasn’t at the now-notorious first Cannes press screening of Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy, where critics booed and bayed for blood with a vigour and volume exceptional even at a festival famed for feisty audience participation. Instead, having overslept and woken with a customary rosé hangover, I dragged myself to the rather more serene and less-attended catchup screening next door, which traditionally starts half an hour later. Perhaps it’s a false memory, but I could swear I recall hearing a general tremor of discontent from outside early into the show.
Either way, 30 minutes later, the cause of the ruckus emerged: with the immortal words “If anyone’s gonna piss on him, it’s gonna be me,” a mascaracaked Nicole Kidman squatted over a writhing Zac Efron on the beach, lowered the bottom half of her gaudy yellow bikini, and urinated generously over his perfectly chiselled torso. That her character, hapless Alabama floozy Charlotte Bless, was merely treating a jellyfish sting in the customary way was immaterial. The Paperboy intends the moment as rude, raucous sensationalism, and got exactly the reaction it sought.
There may have been some complicit giggles mixed in amid the furious catcalls, but by that afternoon, the narrative had been set: Daniels’ sultry American-gothic thriller, the follow-up to his acclaimed, Oscar-graced Precious, was a calamity and an offence, a piss-stain on the reputation of its director, its all-star cast, and the highbrow festival that hosted its premiere. Paperboy-related punchlines became the sport of the festival, as critics competed to nail the most damning takedown: “Lee Daniels: worst filmmaker of our time, or worst film-maker of all time?” mused the AV Club’s Mike
D’Angelo, perhaps winning that particular race.
There was just one problem, in my view: The Paperboy was genuinely good, in a way that was admittedly hard to quantify at a festival where it was stacked up against the likes of Michael Haneke’s Amour and Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone. Daniels’ fully haywire adaptation of Pete Dexter’s eerie, elegiac crime novel wasn’t shooting for prestige, but the elusive euphoria of high camp, its every provocation – and let it be said, Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron might not even crack the top five loopiest things to happen in this humid cinematic daiquiri – aiming to aggravate, arouse and confuse in equal measure.
That’s a risky objective. Camp touchstones are rarely self-appointed, or even intended as such: it’s generally a status bestowed over time by a devoted, gradually cultivated audience. The Paperboy, however, may be a rare exception. The film’s deranged storytelling and sweaty, muchtoo-much formal styling may be knowing in their bad taste, but not patronisingly or disingenuously so: it feels sincerely a product of its director’s restless id.
That’s a very different place, evidently, from the coolly lyrical, noir-inflected spirit of Dexter’s novel, which is a mournful, irony-laced southern tragedy shot through with notes of bitter political satire. The novelist takes a coscripting credit, but it’s hard to imagine that much of his vision made it to the screen. The bones of his story are partially intact: in 1960s small-town Florida, Charlotte, the penpal lover of convicted murder Hilary van Wetter (a perma-leering John Cusack), enlists two investigative reporters (Matthew McConaughey and David Oyelowo) to get her man off death row, with sordid, spiralling consequences.
It’s a lean frame on which Daniels hangs a whole lot of billowing sensual business, as the characters’ woozy, impolite desires and transgressions overwhelm any procedural progress, both in the characters’ minds and the film-making itself. It’s telling that Daniels
orients the story around a young man who doesn’t have much of anything to do with the matter at hand. Playing Jack, the dumb-buck younger brother of one of the reporters, Efron is cast first and foremost as an object of beauty, exploited by the camera in ways hard-boiled genre films tend to reserve for women: at one point, he strips down to white briefs to dance with a fully clothed Kidman in the rain. Their teasing sexual chemistry becomes the motor of the overheated, malfunctioning plot. Daniels turns Dexter’s tight, solemn yarn into a thrashing, suitably seductive ode to horniness and its consequences.
That he somehow wedges in a pithy statement on marginalised blackness in Summer of Love-era America is among the film’s many whiplash-inducing surprises. Atop its knottily entangled ensemble, the film selects the peripheral character of Jack’s family maid Anita (the wonderful Macy Gray, eternally underused on screen) as its improbably omniscient narrator, reeling off layers of character insight she couldn’t possibly access. But a wry method emerges to what seems a curiously arbitrary choice, as Gray’s characteristic smoky drawl captures the maid’s disaffected remove from these grimy proceedings: long abused and taken for granted by a number of the participants, she cares not a whit about any of it.
Daniels, in turn, immerses his audience in these alligator-snapping goings-on with the lascivious glee of a tabloid editor, while the actors – most of all, an extraordinary, brazenly against-type Kidman – commit dementedly to the cause. But The Paperboy defies us to care for them, which is partly what prompted those lusty boos: perched somewhere tipsily between Tarantino and John Waters, it’s exploitation cinema in the most unapologetically lurid and grandly enjoyable sense. (Among the film-makers who previously expressed interest in Dexter’s novel, fascinatingly, was Pedro Almodóvar: what subversive queer dogwhistle was embedded in its terse prose?)
Daniels has made far more nobleminded films, from the punishing abuse chronicle Precious to the stodgy historical diorama The Butler to this year’s Oscar-nominated The United States vs Billie Holiday, all variously undone by his innate, conflicting aesthetic affinity for the tacky. In The Paperboy, however, he set out to make trash first and foremost, smuggling in some burning sexual and political nuances along the way, and made the best film of his career: I’ve seen it three times since, finding new flavors in its strange, chaotic stew on each occasion. Credit to the Cannes selectors for getting it right first time and calling its bluff: it’s a glistening polyester outrage that knows exactly what it’s doing, which is to give every appearance of the opposite.
The Paperboy is available on Peacock and Tubi in the US and to rent digitally in the UK
the mutant variants with the surge, based on what we’ve seen earlier [in the UK and elsewhere], it’s the logical explanation.”
Political failings
Variants of interest or concern have been circulating in India since at least last December, when cases there were still declining, so they are unlikely to be the only factor driving this renewed outbreak. India had largely relaxed its social distancing and quarantine measures by March – a decision now viewed as a profound political misjudgment.
Official case numbers in India started to decline steeply from September. It could have been an opportunity to gird the country’s healthcare system and build vaccination infrastructure ahead of a larger second wave of the kind that other countries had witnessed, and which many scientists were warning was inevitable.
Instead, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, pressed ahead with election rallies, where he boasted about the size of the crowds, and cricket matches including in a new stadium that bore his name. His Bharatiya Janata party declared India had beaten Covid-19 in a laudatory February resolution.
Events permitted to go ahead included the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest gatherings in the world, which drew millions of pilgrims to the banks of the river Ganges over several weeks, and probably provided no shortage of potential hosts for whatever variants were circulating.
For many Indians, living in crowded slums or forced to work to survive, social distancing is impossible. Yet others, especially middle-class people in larger cities, were able to take Covid-19 precautions last year that helped to slow the spread of the virus. Taking the cue from their leaders, many Indians abandoned these measures through February and March, returning to restaurants, salons and malls. For some, this has been a fatal decision.
India has many excellent hospitals and medical professionals, but its state healthcare system is one of the most poorly funded in the world, hovering at a little over 1% of GDP. There is less than one doctor for every 1,000 people, and that figure drops further in rural areas and poorer states.
The result is a fragile system built
India entered the pandemic as the world’s largest producer of vaccines. It continues to produce more than 80m doses a month, but is now being outstripped by China and the US, who made significant investments in their manufacturing last year. India, in contrast, is running into shortages, even though vaccine take-up among Indians has been slower than expected, with about nine in 100 people receiving at least one dose so far.
But owing to its sheer size, vaccinating its way out of the pandemic imminently is out of India’s reach. As of Saturday, there were about 1bn doses administered worldwide. If every single one of those had been used in India, and assuming a two-dose regimen (Johnson & Johnson’s formulation is the only one-dose vaccine so far), the total sum would have been enough to inoculate about 500 million Indians – leaving about 400 million adults still awaiting a shot.