Author: Leah Carlson-Downie

Sundance Film Film Festival 2021 Diary: Day 6

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

Day 6: February 2, 2021

I made it to my final full day of screenings! I’ll be catching up on a few awards winners on the official last day of the festival, and I’m also working on a short wrap up post; so keep your eye out for one more dispatch after this one. Thanks for following along.

On day six, I explored the U.S. Dramatic Competition category, choosing three films I had heard positive things about after their premieres. First up, I watched Nikole Beckwith’s surrogacy comedy Together Together, starring Ed Helms and Patti Harrison. Helms plays a single man in his forties who wants to have a child and start a family, in an inversion of the usual stories about ticking biological clocks; Harrison plays the twenty-something woman he chooses to carry his child. This thoughtful little situational comedy explores the (platonic) relationship that develops between the two main characters. I found the film to be totally lovely and emotionally honest, and Helms and Harrison shine as two lonely people who strike up an odd-couple friendship under unusual circumstances.

Marvelous and the Black Hole (written and directed by Kate Tsang) brought me back into coming-of-age indie dramedy territory (after CODA on day one). Delightful newcomer Miya Cech plays Sammy, a rebellious thirteen-year-old who’s struggling to deal with her grief over her mother’s death. Through happenstance, Sammy meets Margot (Rhea Pearlman), a whimsical children’s magician. Over the course of a summer, Sammy and Margot become unlikely friends. The story hits familiar beats, but, as with CODA, the particulars are charming. 

Jockey also traces a familiar story arc, that of an aging athlete coming to terms with the end of his career and facing his own mortality. Clint Bentley, who wrote and directed the film, grew up in the horse racing world and brings a sense of authenticity and specificity to his portrayal of it. Character actor Clifton Collins, Jr. gives an excellent performance as the titular jockey; his work elevates the whole film to the next level.

My least favorite film of the day had to be First Date (NEXT), Manual Crosby and Darren Knapp’s early-Tarantino homage. The program notes describe the film as “Superbad meets True Romance,” and that about sums it up. Although the teenage leads add that coming-of-age element, the film is otherwise very much of a piece with the many, many Tarantino knock-offs from the late ‘90s. I suppose that the ‘90s are far enough past that this kind of movie counts as a throwback now, but Crosby and Knapp didn’t introduce any fresh or unexpected elements to liven things up. I wanted to like this one more than I did.

I only watched one documentary today: Egyptian filmmaker Ali Al Arabi’s Captains of Zaatari (World Documentary Competition). This understated film follows two teenagers, Syrian refugees living in the world’s largest Syrian refugee camp, as they try to get out and become professional soccer players. They get scouted by a Qatari sports academy, and the movie goes from there. This observational, subdued film allows many of its largest thematic concerns to flourish in the margins and remain almost unsaid. This restraint ultimately makes the film more powerful, subtly commenting on the way that real life doesn’t hit the triumphant beats of Hollywood sports movies. Similarly, the difficulty of life in Zaatari is implied through the boys’ fervent desire to transcend their circumstances, but the film doesn’t revel in misery. The film is ultimately a delicate look at the power of hope.

That’s all for day six! Check back in for my final Sundance 2021 diary.

 

Sundance Film Festival 2021 Diary: Day 5

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

Day 5: February 1, 2021

On day 5, I got to play catch up with a few films I had heard excellent things about over the past few days. I started with Fran Kranz’s Mass (Premieres), one of the best-received films of the festival so far. This chamber piece features knock-out performances by Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Ann Dowd, and Reed Birney as the parents of a victim of a Columbine-esque mass shooting and the parents of the shooter. The film consists almost solely of the conversation that this set of parents has with each other—a conversation that seems to have been set up in an effort to help the victims’ parents heal and find closure. The film is heavy and highly charged, but the script and the performers hold onto emotional and moral nuances and contradictions that could easily have been glossed over in a less thoughtful version of this story. Kranz’s film will no doubt be a conversation starter.

While I doubt it will be as widely seen, Amalia Ulman’s autobiographically-inspired El Planeta (World Dramatic Competition) should also start conversations. Ulman’s film might be one of the best depictions of middle class economic precarity I’ve ever seen; Leo (Amalia Ulman) and her mother (played by Ulman’s real mother, Ale) struggle to get by after Leo’s father dies and leaves them with nothing. Leo’s mother has never worked, and Leo was a student studying abroad. They don’t qualify for social benefits, but they can’t find jobs in Spain’s depressed economy. So they skate by, running small-scale scams to get what they need and maintain appearances. The film is funny, but in a “what else are you supposed to do but laugh” kind of way. It’s a breezy film about a tragic situation; the tone of the film expertly evokes both Leo and (especially) her mother’s fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude about their misfortunes. The more I sit with this one, the more I like it.

Isabel Bethencourt and Parker Hill’s Cusp (U.S. Documentary Competition) has gotten praise for its sensitive depiction of teenage girlhood. Like El Planeta, although operating in different ways, Cusp addresses serious topics without being an Issues Movie. Bethencourt and Hill follow a group of three teenage girls in a small Texas town over the course of one summer; the girls party and hang out, wasting time in that distinctly teenage way. One of the film’s most disquieting through lines becomes the way these young women must constantly deal with the consequences of pervasive, gendered power imbalances; the idea that women are “scared to say no” to men (to non-consensual sex, to controlling boyfriends, to abusive fathers) crops up again and again in the film. Bethencourt and Hill don’t neglect to honor their subjects and show the joyful moments, too, making sure to document the girls’ lives beyond just their trauma.

At the last minute, I decided to squeeze in Sean Ellis’s Victorian werewolf tale Eight for Silver (Premieres). I thought I needed a little burst of good genre fun in between all of my serious movies, and I was definitely right. Although the film could use a tighter edit (its runtime is too long for the amount of story it’s trying to tell), I got a kick out of Ellis’s grimy, gothic monster movie. The creature design for the werewolves could have been more creative, but the mechanics of how a person turns into one of these monsters delighted me. (One particularly gory reveal might be the highlight of the whole thing.) This one is worth catching for fans of monster horror.

The world premiere of Judas and the Black Messiah (directed by Shaka King) capped off my day of screenings. Warner Brothers chose to use the Sundance festival as a launch pad for the film’s awards campaign; the film certainly feels like a glossy studio production in a way that made it stand out from the much smaller films I’ve been watching all week.* King’s film follows William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), the FBI informant who ultimately enabled the assassination of Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton (an unbelievably good Daniel Kaluuya, standing out even in a film packed with strong performances) in 1969. The film is primarily about Hampton’s assassination, tracing O’Neal’s journey as he gets closer to Hampton and ending with the police raid on Hampton’s Chicago home that served as the pretense for his murder. The film works as a powerful indictment of the FBI’s COINTELPRO project, and it’s encouraging to see a movie with such a radical (and thoroughly anti-cop) heart get made by a mainstream studio.

Day six will be my last full day of screenings! Check back tomorrow for another review roundup.

 

 

*Judas and the Black Messiah will be released in theaters and on HBOMax (WW84-style) on February 12. Because of the pandemic, the Academy lengthened its eligibility release window, so Judas will be eligible for Oscars at this year’s awards. If I didn’t have the Sundance pass, I wouldn’t have seen the film at the festival since it’s being released next week; but I’ve been looking forward to the film, and I thought I might as well get into the premiere if I could.

 

Sundance Film Festival 2021 Diary: Day 4

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

Day 4: January 31, 2021

I stayed busy on day four with six movies, a new record made possible by the increased scheduling flexibility of the on-demand second screenings. By the final movie, I had surrendered and decided to watch on my laptop in bed. (I did not fall asleep during the film, though, which is more than I can say for myself at some of the late screenings at the in-person festival.) Six films in one day might be my limit, but never say never.

My favorite film of the day was probably Theo Anthony’s All Light Everywhere (U.S. Documentary Competition). Anthony describes his films as “documentary essays,” which aptly captures the way that All Light Everywhere weaves together thematic threads to make an argument. The film interrogates the idea of objective vision, particularly with regards to photography and cameras, asking the viewer to consider the subjective frame that’s constantly present. I don’t want to spoil where the film ultimately goes or flatten the sense of its scope, but suffice it to say that Anthony grounds these theoretical and philosophical musings about observation in the history and current practices of surveillance and law enforcement. As an art historian and an advocate for visual literacy, I will admit that this film was of particular interest to me; of course I’m down for a two hour meditation on the way cultural and social context frame any image if you know how to look. Your mileage may vary.

In the morning, I made time to catch up with On The Count of Three (U.S. Dramatic Competition), Jerrod Carmichael’s suicide pact buddy comedy. The film pulls off a tricky tonal balancing act, managing to be genuinely funny without undercutting the seriousness of the characters’ decision to mutually self-destruct. Co-leads Christopher Abbott and Carmichael both give great performances, although Abbott’s got the showier part and has received the bulk of the praise so far. Some of the filmmaking choices and bits of dialogue felt clunky, but the film balances its tone so deftly that I couldn’t write the film off entirely. I’ll be curious to see how this one plays outside of the festival.

I also saw two biographical documentaries: Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It (U.S. Documentary Competition) and My Name Is Pauli Murray (Premieres). The Rita Moreno doc (directed by Mariem Pérez Riera) celebrates the life of the iconic actress, singer, and dancer; the film focuses on her status as a trailblazer of Latina representation in Hollywood, as well as her remarkable resilience as she navigated the sexist and racists systems of the industry for decades. My Name is Pauli Murray (co-directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen) works to elevate its subject into the mainstream historical consciousness. West and Cohen first heard about Murray when they were working on their previous documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsberg; Murray, it turns out, was the legal mind who came up with the framework for using the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution to argue against the legality of discrimination on the basis of sex. Previously, this amendment had only be used to legally battle discrimination on the basis of race. The documentary tries to tell the whole story of Murray’s incredible life, but 90 minutes doesn’t quite seem to do Murray justice. The film is a good introduction to an under-recognized civil rights hero, however, and made me want to learn more about Murray.

For my last two films of the day, I took a dive into the weird. First up was Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland (Premieres). The film’s maximalist, post-apocalyptic, East-meets-West aesthetic is the best thing about it; and, indeed, the production design was so fabulous that I found myself disappointed that the rest of the movie didn’t live up to its promise. The film also inexplicably loses steam in the last fifteen minutes or so, right when I wanted things to get peak batshit. (This is a film where Nic Cage’s character gets one of his balls blown off while trapped in a tight leather suit programmed to self-destruct if he fails to complete his mission, so I’m not really sure what I mean when I say “peak batshit.” I just know that I wanted the film to accelerate right when it took its foot off the gas.) I’m glad I made time for this one, but it didn’t quite do it for me. While nestled in bed, I finished off the day with Strawberry Mansion (NEXT), Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley’s lo-fi sci-fi. I appreciated the film’s inventiveness and easily got on its surreal, Gondry-inflected wavelength. Strawberry Mansion isn’t going to change your mind if you aren’t into that kind of thing (if you hear the term “dream auditor” and roll your eyes, this film isn’t for you), but I enjoyed it.

See you back here tomorrow for day five! I’m really, really looking forward to the premiere of Judas and the Black Messiah, so look out for thoughts on that one.

 

Sundance Film Festival 2021 Diary: Day 3

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

Day 3: January 30, 2021

Day three, and we’re still going strong. I’ve managed to increase the number of movies I can fit into my schedule day over day; today I watched five, and tomorrow I’ll be attempting six. I think my brain said, “Eight hours of sleep? During Sundance? Get outta here, watch more movies.” And I willingly complied, because I’m greedy.

Before I get into the film roundup, I have some notes on the chat function in the virtual premiere screening room. I had initially written off the chat function as unusable, but I’ve come to realize that this really depends on the film. The chats for the buzziest, busiest films do quickly become hard to follow and difficult to use for conversation; however, in the waiting rooms for some of the documentaries and smaller films, I’ve had some nice interactions in the chat with fellow festival-goers. As the festival has gone on and people have seen more films, the chat has also become a place for people to swap recommendations about what movies are worth catching. As I start to view more on-demand second screenings, which don’t have the live chat function, I think I might start to miss it. 

I will also say that it’s been lovely chatting with some of my friends on social media who have also been doing the virtual festival. We’ve mostly found each other through our Instagram stories and swapped stories in our DMs. It’s not the same as seeing each other in line at a screening and waving, but it’ll do.* I’ve also done several screening parties with friends and family over Zoom, which has been great. I almost always do the festival with my mom, and we’ve kept up that tradition this year. And one of my dearest friends, who lives in Denver and has never done the festival in person, decided to take the virtual festival as an opportunity to Sundance for the first time. (She’s a horror aficionado, and she’s stretched me to venture into the Midnight category; we watched Censor together last night, which we both loved. More on that later.) This is my shout out to all of you who have connected with me over the past few days and helped remind me that the virtual festival is still a communal experience.

Today’s films were more of a mixed bag, but, happily, I ended the day on a strong note with three films I enjoyed. I’ll start the roundup with the documentaries: Sabaya (World Documentary Competition) and Searchers (NEXT). I don’t think I could have purposefully picked two documentaries more opposite in tone or subject matter. Sabaya (directed by Hogir Hirori) follows a group known as the Yazidi Home Center that rescues kidnapped Yazidi women from sex-slavery in an ISIS camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border; Searchers (directed by Pacho Velez) captures impressions of a swathe of New Yorkers as they look for love—or sex or connection—on various dating apps. Sabaya’s subject matter is harrowing, and the people of the Yazidi Home Center (as well as the crew involved with making the film) routinely risk their lives to do the work depicted. The film can’t quite decide, however, whether it wants to be a portrait of the rescued women’s trauma or a heroic account of the incredibly brave people who run the rescue missions. It splits the difference to its own detriment, ultimately. 

Searchers proved to be a sweet, surprisingly moving little treat. In an effective move, Velez positions the camera behind a computer screen and puts a crew member in charge of clicking, typing, and inputting information into the computer. Participants in the documentary look directly into the camera as they look at the dating app up on the computer screen. They must verbally communicate what actions they want to take so that the offscreen crew member can execute them on the computer. This choice doesn’t come across like a gimmick; rather, this interruption allows the viewer of the documentary into the decision making process that goes on when someone’s absorbed with a dating app on their phone. This deceptively slight doc thoroughly charmed me. (Tickets to the second screening of Searchers on February 1, 2021 are still available as of this writing.)

From the U.S. Dramatic Competition category, I saw Wild Indian (directed by Lyle Mitchell Corbine, Jr.) and Passing (directed by actress Rebecca Hall). Wild Indian didn’t connect for me, despite an intriguing premise and strong lead performances. Of the two lead characters, the film focused much more on the enigmatic—and likely sociopathic—man (Makwa, played ferociously by Michael Greyeyes), who felt like too much of a blank slate for the film to really kick into high gear. I kept wondering if I would have found the film more successful if the balance had been shifted to focus more on the other lead (Ted-O, sensitively brought to the screen by Chaske Spencer).

The much buzzed about Passing worked best as an acting showcase for Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, who are always powerhouses. In the film, which is set in the 1920s, Thompson and Negga play old acquaintances who accidentally reconnect when they run into each other in a New York City tea room. Since they’ve last spoken, Negga’s character has passed the color line to live as white, hiding her racial identity from her husband and her new social circle. The racial passing aspect of the story has gotten the most attention, but the film investigates various ways that people choose their identities (often at the expense of their authentic selves or true desires) to “pass.” Hall’s directorial debut is an admirably restrained and surprisingly queer psychological thriller shot in delicate black and white. I want to sit with this one to see if the emotional impact deepens or lingers, but I think I liked it.

I rounded out the night by catching up with Censor, which had accumulated great word of mouth buzz since it premiered on opening night. My horror-loving friend, aforementioned above, had singled this film out from the beginning of the festival as one she was excited for; so we were both pretty ready to be taken for a ride by director Prano Bailey-Bond. Both my friend and I really dug this one. Enid (NIamh Algar) works as a censor for the British government, banning “video nasties” to protect the public from their immoral and depraved excesses. (In the 1980s, when the film is set, Britain did censor and ban ultra-violent, low-budget exploitation horror films in a burst of moral panic over these films circulating on VHS.) In an excellent twist on the fear that violent horror films would negatively influence the public’s behavior, Enid slowly loses her grip on reality over the course of the movie, confusing events and unresolved issues from her own childhood with the films she watches every day for work. Bailey-Bond clearly loves the aesthetics of ‘80s horror, and her excellent film pays homage accordingly. 

That’s it for day three! day four marks the halfway point of the festival, and I still have so many films I’m looking forward to. Tune in tomorrow for more!

 

 

*I tried to work out an on line/online joke here, but that seemed too regional. Also, after only two years in New York, I don’t actually say “on line” instead of “in line.” Sorry, this footnote is basically the equivalent of that lazy “insert joke about [x] here” tweet format. I’m writing these dispatches in a hurry, I don’t have time to be witty!

 

Sundance Film Festival 2021 Diary: Day 2

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

Day 2: January 29, 2021

Welcome back! I had a successful first full day of screenings; I enjoyed three out of the four films I watched, which is a pretty good average.

In the morning, I watched President (World Documentary Competition), Camilla Nielsson’s documentary about the 2018 presidential election in Zimbabwe. Nielsson follows Nelson Chamisa, the candidate of the Movement for Democratic Change party, and his campaign staff as he runs to unseat the candidate of the ruling party (ZANU-PF). Although Zimbabwe’s democratic constitution provides for free and fair democratic elections every five years, in practice, the military leaders of ZANU-PF have refused to concede control of the government and run truly transparent elections. This urgent film highlights the MDC’s tremendous uphill battle to hold ZANU-PF accountable to the will of the people. Chamisa and his staff refuse to succumb to a feeling of futility as they fight against a truly corrupt system, holding fast to the promise of democracy and risking their lives to do so. This film isn’t uplifting (ZANU-PF still rules in Zimbabwe), but Nielsson’s film provides an intimate look into an important struggle.

For my afternoon screening, I checked out the animated head trip Cryptozoo (NEXT), written and directed by Dash Shaw, with animation by Jane Samborski. Cryptozoo tells a globe-trotting action-adventure story about a woman who rescues and shelters cryptids, giving them a home at the Cryptozoo and ostensibly providing them with a better life. (All of the cryptids depicted in the film derive from different global folklore traditions, and the creature design here is top notch.) The film, which is set in the 1960s with an aesthetic to match, explores the allure of counter-culture idealism and dreams of utopia; but the film’s thesis might best be summed up when, early in the film, a character says under her breath, “Utopias never work out.” I don’t think this movie would succeed at all without the vibrant, creative, and psychedelic animation (the plot follows a familiar arc); however, I don’t necessarily see this as a flaw, since the art should be integral to the success of an animated film. I really took to the film on first viewing.

My third film of the day, Brazilian drama The Pink Cloud (World Dramatic Competition), was my least favorite. Written and shot entirely before the COVID-19 pandemic, writer/director Iuli Gerbase’s film imagines a scenario in which the appearance of a toxic pink cloud forces everyone into an indefinite quarantine. Ten seconds of exposure to the cloud results in instant death, so everyone must stay inside, trapped wherever they happened to be when the cloud showed up. The movie follows the relationship of a man and a woman who are forced to live together; they were having a one-night stand when the cloud descended and confined them in the same house. The film felt like a thought experiment more than anything else, and very little about the movie struck an emotionally resonant chord. Gerbases’s script hints at other (more interesting, absurd, tragic, horrifying) things happening in different corners of the world she’s created, and I kept wishing that she had given more room to these stories. Lead actors Renata de Lélis and Eduardo Mendonça carry the film well, but the whole thing didn’t add up to much for me.

I closed out the day with Rebel Hearts (U.S. Documentary Competition), Pedro Kos’s documentary about the sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and their experiments in the 1960s as they sought to modernize their religious order. These women made headlines as they clashed with the archbishop of Los Angeles, becoming a flashpoint in the larger conversation about how the Roman Catholic Church should operate in the twentieth century. These women were feminists, activists for social justice, and artists; they wanted to be engaged with the world in a way that nuns had previously been forbidden from doing. Kos’s documentary combines interviews, archival footage, and animation to create a warm tribute to the revolutionary women of IHM. This inspiring, moving film tells the historical story in a crisp, engaging manner and links the social justice movements of the ‘60s to the social justice work going on today.

As of publishing this post, tickets are still available for the on-demand second screenings of President, Cryptozoo, and Rebel Hearts on January 31, 2021. Like I said in my intro post, if you have an internet connection and $15, you, too, can get in on the festival action!

 

Sundance Film Festival 2021 Diary: Day 1

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

Day 1: January 28, 2021

The festival has officially started! I kicked off my 2021 schedule with a documentary shorts program, and then in the evening I joined the premiere stream of CODA, one of the opening night selections. 

For context, the festival organizers have set up two types of screenings. Each movie gets one premiere screening that consists of a three hour slot with a live Q&A afterwards; then, on a subsequent day, each film gets a second screening, which is a 24-hour on-demand window. The shorts programs are an exception to this model—the shorts programs have no premiere screenings but are available on-demand throughout the whole festival. (I love this idea, because it encourages people to try the shorts programs since they’re constantly available.)

First, I checked out the shorts on-demand screening format. I appreciated that the shorts on-demand stream included a programmer’s introduction, the Sundance introduction, and the category information card before the films started playing. After the shorts program concluded, a pre-recorded Q&A with the filmmakers followed as part of the stream (there was no need to click to another page to find the Q&A). Having all of this packaged together helped preserve that “screening” experience; I didn’t feel like I was watching a playlist of shorts on YouTube or something. Including the Q&A at the end of the stream, rather than putting it on a separate page, encouraged me to watch it and spend some time with the filmmakers. One big positive about the pre-recorded Q&A: the festival programmer moderating the discussion had very thoughtful questions that elicited interesting answers. The pre-recorded Q&A also ran a bit longer than an after-screening Q&A normally would, which allowed all of the filmmakers to speak for an equal amount of time. The Q&A consisted of a recorded Zoom call, so it didn’t feel overly polished or worked-on, but I found the quality of the discussion to be much higher than you’d get at a standard after-screening audience Q&A at an in-person festival.

I opted to watch the Documentary Shorts Program 1, which included the short films Tears Teacher, Up At Night, This Is The Way We Rise, Dear Philadelphia, Snowy, and The Rifleman. Snowy and The Rifleman were the standouts for me in this program. Snowy, the most playful of the films in the collection, is about the filmmaker’s family’s pet turtle, Snowy. Snowy lives in the basement, tended to mostly by the filmmaker’s dad. The short investigates the question of whether or not Snowy is happy. The Rifleman succinctly exposes the links between the modern NRA, resistance to gun control laws, and xenophobic violence at the U.S.-Mexico border. The film, composed entirely of archival footage and photographs, focuses on Harlon Carter (who is considered the father of the modern NRA) and his personal history.

My first premiere screening also went smoothly. Fifteen minutes before the screening begins, a virtual waiting-room opens up. You can click in to join the waiting room, and you’re taken to the screening landing page. This landing page functions as a virtual space; a countdown banner ticks down at the top of the page, the video player below that displays the pre-screening content (ads and music), there’s a live chat feed where everyone in the virtual screening room can say hi, and there’s a little tracker bar in the shape of a row of theater seats to show how full the screening is.* The chat, while a good idea in theory, quickly became unusable due to the number of people typing at once. I followed the feed for a few minutes before the messages started coming in too fast for me to read them. Mostly, it was people saying where they were tuning in from and adding their Twitter or Letterbxd handles for others to follow. I did notice, however, that festival programmers and staff were in the chat answering logistical questions, and useful announcements (like how to access the live Q&A after the film) popped up in the chat periodically. Overall, I liked the idea of the screening room page and appreciated the effort made to create a virtual space. The chat function could be tweaked to allow for actual conversation, but the flurry of comments reminded me, in their way, that this screening was a shared experience. I sort of liked the way that the crazy chat signaled the busyness and crowdedness of the virtual screening room.

Once the countdown clock got to zero, the screening started automatically. (Well, it should have. I had to refresh the page in my browser, but then it worked.) The premiere screening also included a programmer’s intro, the Sundance intro, and the category information card. After the film, there was a live Q&A, which was on a separate page. When I clicked through to the Q&A page, it looked similar to the virtual screening room page. The video player displayed the Q&A (a livestream via YouTube of a Zoom call with a programmer and the filmmakers), and below the player there was a space for audience members to submit questions. Although this Q&A was live and questions were being submitted in real time, the moderating programmer could smartly pick and choose between submitted questions; so, again, I felt that the Q&A in this format was much more interesting than the after-screening Q&As usually are.

CODA (directed by Siân Heder) turned out to be a pleasant opening night pick. The film, part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition category, is a classic Sundance crowd pleaser; I’d put it in top contention for the audience award at the end of the festival. The movie follows high schooler Ruby (a fantastic Emilia Jones in what should be a breakout role), the hearing daughter of two deaf parents (Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur). Ruby helps her parents and her brother (Daniel Durant), who is also deaf, navigate their fishing business, often acting as an interpreter. But Ruby possesses a talent for singing, and as she realizes how good she is with the help of an interested teacher, she decides to apply for music school and think about leaving her family. The particulars of the movie, especially the way it portrays deafness and deaf culture with warmth and care, set the film somewhat apart from the countless other indie coming-of-age dramedies that have premiered at the festival in years past. Personally, I was delighted to see Ferdia Walsh-Peelo (such a stand out in 2016’s Sing Street) pop up in the film as Ruby’s love interest. He’s not given too much to do, but he is so charming anyway that I didn’t mind. (The second screening of CODA on January 30 has already sold out, but I’m willing to bet that this one will get distribution and a decent release.)

That’s a wrap for Day 1! Cheers to a good start to the festival; I’m looking forward to my first full day of movies tomorrow.

 

 

*Please note that “pre-screening content” is the term used by the festival staff in the chat. It’s weird and corporate sounding, I know.

 

Sundance Film Festival 2021 Diary: Intro Post

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

We’re doing Sundance 2021 at home this year, baby! It’s going to be a little weird, and my butt will probably meld with my couch cushions by the end of the week. But I bought a pass, and I’m ready to watch as many films as I can from January 28 to February 3. Challenge accepted.

Sundance and I have a long-term relationship; I started going to the Sundance Film Festival when I was sixteen and attending Park City High School. After class got out, I’d hop on the waitlist line and try to get a standby ticket for whatever was showing at the Eccles theater that evening.* On the weekends, my mom and I would try to get into four movies a day waitlisting. We loved it. When I moved down to Salt Lake City, I didn’t stop attending the festival every January. I became a Salt Lake City Sundance convert. The festival moves at a slower pace down the canyon (and the celebrities rarely show up at the Q&As), but I could usually get into whatever screenings I wanted—and locals passes that only worked for Salt Lake City screenings were cheaper. Plus, the filmmakers would always gas us up by saying that they preferred the Salt Lake screenings with “real audiences” to the industry audiences in Park City. The mostly local audiences, including me, loved to feel special, and the line always worked like a charm on us.

2020 was the first time I missed the festival in ten years; last year, I couldn’t justify traveling back to Utah, missing class at the beginning of the semester, and taking the time off work. So, while Virtual Sundance will definitely not be the same, I’m quite excited to be back at the festival in whatever form. So far, I’ve been impressed with the way the virtual festival has been set up. Everything has run smoothly, from a technical standpoint, and the user interface is conveniently centralized and easy to navigate. 

I’m curious about how buzz will circulate during Virtual Sundance, as well as what things the festival planners have put in place to create a sense of community. The atmosphere is half the fun of a film festival, and I’m looking forward to exploring what that looks like in a virtual setting. For what it’s worth, maintaining a “festival atmosphere” in a virtual environment appears to be a priority of the festival planners. I want this diary to serve as a critique of Sundance’s virtual festival model as well as a record of the films I watch. So here’s what to expect with each entry: some thoughts about the Virtual Festival experience as the week goes on, a roundup of the films I’ve viewed each day, and then an assortment of whatever miscellaneous notes I’ve collected. This is the first time I’ve done a Sundance diary, so thanks for reading and going on this journey with me. Also, now seems like a good time for a reminder that anyone from anywhere in the U.S. can join the virtual festival this year! So, if you want to, you can totally get in on the fun if you have an internet connection and $15.

Tune in tomorrow for my Day 1 post! The festival starts today, but my diary posts will be a day behind since screenings go late every day. (My January 28 diary will go up on January 29, for example.) Let’s get this party started!

 

 

*The largest screening venue in Park City by capacity is the Eccles theater, which is also the Park City High School auditorium. Yes, it was weird to see celebrities stand on the stage where I did the fall musicals.

 

EXTRA: Best of 2020 Honorable Mentions and Miscellaneous Items

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

If you’re interested, I’ve put together a little bonus post with my 2020 honorable mentions and other miscellaneous items. Think of it as a sort of “P.S.” to my favorites list.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

While Lover’s Rock proved the standout for me, I appreciated all of the films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology (available in the U.S. exclusively on Amazon Prime), particularly the first installment Mangrove. Also exclusively on Amazon Prime: Julia Hart’s I’m Your Woman, a crime drama starring Rachel Brosnahan that’s told from an interesting sideways perspective; and What the Constitution Means to Me, a filmed version of Heidi Schreck’s one-woman hit Broadway play, directed by the incomparable Marielle Heller.

If you watch The Old Guard and think to yourself, “Whoa, I need more Luca Marinelli in my life, stat!” try checking out Martin Eden (available to digitally rent through KinoNow). As the title character, the Italian actor owns this film, a nationally transposed adaptation of the Jack London novel. (I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the film as a whole upon first viewing, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had made time for a rewatch, Martin Eden would be on my main list instead of in the honorable mentions.) If you watch The Old Guard and need another fresh take on the superhero genre, try Harley Quinn spin-off Birds of Prey (currently available to stream on HBOMax), Cathy Yan’s satisfyingly feminist entry into the DCEU.

Although only one nonfiction film made my main list, I’d like to add a few more here in the honorable mentions. Bloody Nose Empty Pockets documents the closing day of a dive bar, blending fact and fiction to intriguing ends. With its similarly non-judgemental exploration of the bonds alcohol forges, Bloody Nose could make an interesting double-feature with Another Round. Collective, a propulsive film with the pace of a thriller (if not the satisfying resolution), follows a group of Romanian investigative journalists as they expose the extreme corruption in the Romanian hospital system.

Steven Soderbergh’s deceptively small-scale Let Them All Talk (available exclusively on HBOMax) has been growing on me since I first watched it. If you watch The Forty-Year-Old Version and find yourself looking for another film that treats women over 35 like real human beings, try this one.

Finally, I’d like to single out Johnny Flynn’s excellent turn as Mr. Knightley in Autumn de Wilde’s delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. (available to stream on HBO Max or for digital rental). The whole movie is a confection; the two leads have crackling chemistry, and Anya Taylor-Joy (having a banner year after the success of The Queen’s Gambit last fall) brings a wonderfully bratty energy to the title character. But it’s Flynn who plays one of my favorite scenes in any movie this year. That would be the short scene where Mr. Knightley, after a thwarted attempt to confess his newly realized sexual and romantic feelings for Emma, returns home, tears off his outerwear, and literally throws himself on the floor in frustration and anguish. It’s hot, relatable, hilarious, raw, and heartbreaking all at once. Flynn plays a man completely destroyed by unrequited love like no other working actor (see also: the cult favorite TV show Love Sick)—give him his flowers.

2019/2020 liminal release special mentions:

I did not see Portrait of a Lady on Fire (currently available for digital rental or to stream on Hulu) or Uncut Gems (currently available for digital rental or to stream on Netflix) until early 2020, when they went into wide release. Because both films are technically 2019 releases, I did not want to include them on my 2020 list and be redundant. But I loved them both.

TV special mention:

Michaela Coel’s HBO limited series I May Destroy You is absolutely one of the best things I watched this year; but it’s not a film, so I made this special category for it. [TW: sexual assault] Coel, who wrote and starred in the series, took inspiration from her own experience as a victim of sexual assault to create the show. When Arabella (Coel), an up-and-coming London writer, gets roofied and raped, she finds herself unable to go on with her life as normal as she processes the trauma. The show charts Arabella’s journey as she seeks justice for herself and tries to come to terms with what happened to her. Each episode also explores the boundaries of consent in different circumstances, following Arabella’s friends or showing flashbacks to Arabella’s past. The result is devastating, funny, sensitive, urgent, and a radically different approach to a subject that has long been misrepresented on screen.

Some notable 2020 films I haven’t caught up with yet because I’m only human:

I don’t have an Apple TV+ subscription, so I haven’t been able to see Cartoon Saloon’s newest film Wolfwalkers or Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. I have also been meaning to check out The Painter and the Thief, She Dies Tomorrow, Babyteeth, Time, Luxor, Beanpole, His House, and Swallow. Promising Young Woman and Nomadland, two films that some critics have included on their Best of 2020 lists, still aren’t widely available as of this writing; if I end up loving either of those films, find them on next year’s list! I am stubbornly waiting to watch Tenet, because I would like to experience it on the big screen and am hoping it gets a re-release when movie theaters open up again.

 

Leah’s Favorite Films of 2020

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie

 

First things first: If you didn’t watch a single new film in 2020, I wouldn’t blame you. Last year, I had entire months where I found it very difficult to focus on anything new, let alone anything challenging. The allure of the Comfort Watch pulled strongly at all of us, and I was certainly not immune to the siren song of the familiar. Frankly, sometimes watching something that required full engagement felt like work for which I didn’t have the mental capacity.

Watching films entirely at home for the majority of the year presented another hurdle. I’m a devotee of the movie theater for many reasons, but I love going out to the cinema first and foremost because, when I’m in the theater, I am forced to pay attention to what’s on screen. It’s immersive, and the rules of the place forbid me from taking out my phone to absentmindedly scroll Twitter or take pictures of my cats. It’s also, to be blunt, hard as hell to keep track of new releases when everything goes straight to streaming. If I wanted to see a new movie before, all I had to do was check what was playing at the cinema—multiplex or arthouse. Finding the latest releases on streaming and VOD can feel like the Wild West in comparison. While critics like Alissa Wilkinson at Vox have been compiling wonderful weekly lists of new streaming releases since March, I still put in more effort last year to keep track of what was out and where to watch it than I ever had to before. If this is the future of movie-going, we’d all better brush up on our spreadsheet skills.

Despite these unusual circumstances, I managed to experience new films that charmed, confronted, edified, unsettled, moved, enraged, and electrified me. As people more knowledgeable than I have noted, the general lack of tentpole releases dominating the cultural landscape left room for a greater variety of films to reach a wider audience. The cultural conversation felt less mandated (very rarely this year was everyone talking about the same movie at the same time) and more passionate and idiosyncratic. Cinephiles of all stripes found room to vocally advocate for their favorite smaller new releases—which now, because of the pandemic-accelerated streaming revolution, more people than ever could actually watch. I found much value this year, even more so than usual, in recommendations shared by film critics and friends. My hope is that you might find similar value in this list. I put this list together in the spirit of sharing, and, as such, I would love for the sharing to go both ways! I encourage you to add your favorite films of the year in the comments and start a conversation.

So, without further ado, here are my 14 favorite films of 2020 (plus a guest pick by Keith), listed in alphabetical order because I avoid ranking things whenever possible.*

 

Still from the film Another Round, profile of a man drinking from a champagne bottle with a crowd of young people behind him

 

Another Round 

The premise of this Danish film sounds like the set up for a raunchy, The Hangover-esque comedy of escalating disasters: a quartet of middle-aged men, dissatisfied with the ways they’ve settled as they’ve gotten older, decide to conduct an experiment in which they keep themselves day drunk every day of the week. They want to see if maintaining a buzz will improve their lives. What follows is a remarkably humane, non-moralistic exploration of male friendship, midlife crisis, and the role that alcohol occupies in the fabric of social life. Director Thomas Vinterberg pulls off an astonishing tonal balancing act and makes it look easy with the aid of his leading actors. Vinterberg’s frequent collaborator Mads Mikkelsen has received deserved praise for his work in the film—the movie’s final scene, all Mikkelsen’s, is sublime—but the film’s three other leading men turn in equally sensitive and fully-realized performances. / Where to watch: Another Round is available for digital rental.

The Assistant

Documentarian Kitty Green brings an observational style to her first narrative film, about a single day in the life of an executive assistant named Jane (Julia Garner) who works for a lightly-fictionalized—and never shown or named—version of Harvey Weinstein. When Jane finds potential evidence of her boss’s sexual misconduct, the abusive and complicit office culture discourages her from taking any meaningful action based on her suspicions. This quiet film depicts the crushing environment of a truly toxic workplace with devastating accuracy, but any woman who has worked an office job will recognize, to some degree, the power dynamics at play. The film takes an understated approach to the material, recognizing the way that, in real life, these power dynamics are so insidious because they are always understood but never spoken. / Where to watch: The Assistant is available to stream on Hulu or for digital rental.**

Dick Johnson Is Dead

This unconventional documentary poses the question, “How do you prepare yourself for the death of someone you love?” With Dick Johnson Is Dead, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson attempts to face the imminent loss of her elderly father by repeatedly staging and filming his death by horrific accident. If that sounds weird and maybe a little uncomfortable, that’s because it is. The film inevitably deals with heavy subject matter, as Dick’s slow decline due to Alzheimer’s disease sits at the tragic heart of the project; but Johnson, by and large, treats these “death” scenes (and the accompanying “afterlife” scenes) playfully, positioning them as surreal imaginative exercises. Ultimately, the film works as an experimental and heartfelt corrective to our cultural taboos around discussing death and as a celebration of its subject’s life. / Where to watch: Dick Johnson Is Dead is a Netflix exclusive.

Driveways

Andrew Ahn’s delicate drama knocked me out when I watched it last May. The film starts when Kathy (Hong Chau) takes her young son Cody (an outstanding Lucas Jaye) with her to clean out her sister’s house after her sister’s unexpected death. Kathy’s sister, it turns out, was a hoarder, and getting the house ready to sell will take more work than Kathy anticipated. Cody, trying to find a way to fill his time while his mom cleans, ends up befriending his new neighbor, a Korean War vet named Del (Brian Dennehy, in his final performance). Driveways deals with loss, loneliness, and alienation; but the film is mostly about the balm of finding community where you least expect to find it. This one is a must see. / Where to watch: Driveways is available for digital rental.

 

Still from the song Eurovision Song Contest, a man dressed in a Viking costume walking toward the camera with a woman in a white dress behind him

 

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

At last, a comedy! Lars (Will Ferrell) has desperately wanted to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest since he was child. Sigrit (Rachel McAdams) is less ambitious, but she makes music with Lars because she loves to sing (and because she loves Lars). Through a mounting series of mishaps, the Icelandic duo finally manages to fail their way into competing at Eurovision, where the majority of the film’s action takes place. The movie functions as more of an homage to the real Eurovision than a satire of it, and this enthusiastic and sincere appreciation of the song contest’s bombastic absurdity is the film’s greatest strength. Pop producer Savan Kotecha put together a soundtrack of ridiculously catchy, legit-sounding Eurovision-style bangers for the film; I dare you to watch it without getting at least one of the songs stuck in your head. Bonus: Dan Stevens delivers one of his best performances to date as the scene-stealing Russian contestant, Alexander Lemtov. / Where to watch: Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is a Netflix exclusive.***

First Cow

In the Pacific Northwest of the 1820s, two very different men (played by John Magaro and Orion Lee) cross paths as they seek to make their fortunes on the frontier. They have no startup capital and no resources to their names, so they band together and engage in a harmless act of theft to get their business going: they clandestinely milk a rich landowner’s dairy cow every night. With the milk, they make “oily cakes” to sell in town. The oily cakes are a hit, and the men’s fortunes start to look up until the landowner starts to suspect them of dairy theft. Kelly Reichardt directs this quiet but stealthily powerful reexamination of prevailing myths about the wide-open economic opportunities of the American frontier. / Where to watch: First Cow is available for digital rental.

The Forty-Year-Old Version

Writer, director, producer, and star Radha Blank broke through in a big way at last year’s Sundance Film Festival with The Forty-Year-Old Version, her semi-autobiographical debut film. This sharp comedy follows “Radha,” a mid-career playwright, as she struggles to maintain her artistic voice and integrity in the face of market demands as well as her own fears of wasted potential. When “Radha” gets one of her plays produced, a piece about gentrification in her Harlem neighborhood, she finds herself artistically unfulfilled as she realizes what kind of script the (white) producers actually want. “Radha” starts writing raps, casually at first, until she realizes that rapping might be more personally rewarding than the play she’s working on. The film, shot in beautiful black and while, looks gorgeous, and Blank gives a charismatic, winning lead performance. The Forty-Year-Old version provides a meta-answer to “Radha’s” conundrum, standing as an assured and delightful example of what results when an artist refuses to filter her own viewpoint into something less singular and personal. / Where to watch: The Forty-Year-Old Version is a Netflix exclusive.

 

Still from the film Kajillionaire, a woman in a white jacket pushes a shopping cart and another woman walks beside her both facing the camera

 

Kajillionaire

Multi-hyphenate artist Miranda July strikes again with Kajillionaire, her latest film. Evan Rachel Wood stars as Old Dolio, a twenty-something woman who has spent her entire life running bizarre, small-scale cons on behalf of her parents (Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins). When Old Dolio’s parents rope a charming stranger, Melaine (a sparkling Gina Rodriguez), into their scheming, Old Dolio starts to become jealous of the way they treat the newcomer. To say more would be to spoil too much. Kajillionaire operates in July’s usual whimsical, off-kilter register, but the film is far from twee. July creates a dreamscape in which to explore what it means to accept your biological family, even if you might not exactly love them, and what it feels like to discover your own found family. / Where to watch: Kajillionaire is available for digital rental.

Lovers Rock

Lovers Rock is the second installment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of films, which focuses on the lives of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s. Some of the films in the anthology are based on historical events, while others, like Lovers Rock, focus on everyday lived experience. Lovers Rock depicts a house party, tracing the energy of the evening. That’s it. It’s simple, universal, and humming with the promise of sex; it’s complex, particular, and humming with the threat of violence. An unforgettable, euphoric sing along scene serves as the film’s centerpiece. Clocking in at just 68 minutes, Lovers Rock is a perfect little gem. / Where to watch: Lovers Rock is an Amazon Prime exclusive.

The Old Guard

Birds of Prey and The Old Guard kept swapping places on my list and in my  honorable mentions. They’re both hugely entertaining, and they both play with superhero movie genre conventions in exciting ways. The Old Guard won out for two reasons. 1) I watched Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film multiple times this year, but I have yet to revisit Birds of Prey. The Old Guard has a soulful melancholy at its core that I found irresistible. I mean, any good movie about immortals has to be at least a bit moody. 2) It has my favorite on-screen kiss of the year. / Where to watch: The Old Guard is a Netflix exclusive.

Shirley

Shirley doesn’t give author Shirley Jackson the biopic treatment. Almost nothing about Shirley is factually accurate to the author’s life; instead, director Josephine Decker pays homage to the real Jackson by artfully evoking the atmosphere of her horror stories and placing a fictional Jackson (a deliciously scenery-chewing Elisabeth Moss) inside of it. When Jackson’s husband invites one of his graduate students and his wife to stay at the Jackson home, Shirley starts playing mind games with the wife. Like Moss’s Shirley, this film is wickedly smart, wildly unpredictable, and just menacing enough to keep you on edge the whole time. / Where to watch: Shirley is available to stream on Hulu or for digital rental.

 

Still from the film Sorry We Missed You, a man sits in the back of a delivery truck with a young girl

 

Sorry We Missed You

Ken Loach’s latest takes a hard look at the social cost of the unchecked rise of the gig economy. The film tracks Ricky, the patriarch of a working class family in northern England, as he takes a contract job as a delivery man for a thinly-veiled Amazon-like corporation. (If you’ve ever wondered how Amazon Prime one-day delivery works, this is it.) The mounting indignities of working a contract job eventually overwhelm Ricky and his economically precarious family. This angry, bleak movie succeeds both as tough social commentary and as an intimate family drama. It’s a tough watch, but it should be required viewing as more laws like California’s Prop 22 show up on ballots in states nationwide. / Where to watch: Sorry We Missed You is available to stream on the Criterion Channel or for digital rental.

Sound of Metal

Riz Ahmed absolutely dazzles as Ruben Stone, a heavy metal drummer who suddenly loses his hearing. Darius Marder’s film, made with the input and involvement of members of the deaf community, sensitively shows Ruben’s journey as he tries to come to terms with being deaf. The film also treats its lead character’s sobriety with unusual care; this is a rare film about sobriety, not addiction or relapse. Although the star turn belongs to Ahmed, the supporting cast also does uniformly excellent work, particularly character actor Paul Raci (in what I hope turns out to be a breakout role). I also must mention the exemplary sound design, which throws the viewer into Ruben’s new auditory world to disorienting and anxiety-inducing effect. Anticipate some deserved love for this film in the below-the line Oscar categories, as well a Best Actor nom for Ahmed. / Where to watch: Sound of Metal is an Amazon Prime exclusive.

Sylvie’s Love

I would say, “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore,” but the truth is that they never made ‘em like this. First-time director Eugene Ashe’s Sylvie’s Love takes the mid-century romantic melodrama and reimagines it with two Black leads and a mostly Black supporting cast. The movie feels decidedly old-fashioned, but in the best way; Ashe’s decision to center a Black couple in this type of movie, without totally deconstructing the genre, is quietly radical. Well-bred Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) and jazz musician Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) meet when he applies for a job at her father’s record shop in Harlem. The film follows their relationship and chance encounters over several years, from the late 1950s to the mid-’60s. This sweeping romance works on the strength of the leads and the impeccable production design, with an assist from the lush jazz soundtrack. / Where to watch: Sylvie’s Love is an Amazon Prime exclusive.

 

Still from the film The Vast of Night, close up of a teenage girl at a telephone operator switchboard

 

The Vast of Night (Keith’s Guest Pick)

Set in 1950’s New Mexico, the movie opens as a small town is setting up for the big high school basketball game. That night, while everyone else is at the event, a call containing a mysterious signal interrupts what would otherwise be a quiet night for the switchboard operator, Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick). A puzzled Fay calls the local disc jockey and audio guru Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz) for help. Everett plays the signal on the air, hoping to get more information from anyone listening. Channeling classics like The Twilight Zone, this throwback sci-fi follows Fay and Everett as they attempt to understand and decode what they’ve heard. This film is an exciting journey of discovery that gradually leads Fay and Everett further toward the paranormal and keeps the audience guessing in unexpected ways. One of my favorite parts of this character-driven film is how skillfully it shifts in pace and tone, and some of the witnesses that our main characters find have some truly engrossing tales to tell. — contributed by Keith Downie / Where to watch: The Vast of Night is an Amazon Prime exclusive.

 

 

*All provided information about streaming availability is specific to the U.S. and up to date at the time of posting. If a film is only available on a specific streaming service, I have noted it as “exclusive” (i.e. “Netflix exclusive”). “Digital rental” means that the film is available for on-demand digital rental through the major services like iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon Prime. “Amazon Prime exclusive” means that the film is only available to stream with an Amazon Prime Video subscription; these titles are not available to rent via Amazon Prime. I know, I know. Like I said, it’s the Wild West.

**The Assistant was the last film I saw in a movie theater before everything shut down in March. I went to a screening at the Angelika in Manhattan, and there was a Q&A with the director afterwards. My kingdom to be able to do this kind of thing again soon!

***I think Eurovision is my most-watched movie of the year, at three viewings since June. That’s how much joy it brought me. I also learned to play “Ja Ja Ding Dong” on the ukulele “as a bit.”

 

“For in this world I’m bound to ramble”: O Brother, Where Art Thou? at 20

Posted on by Leah Carlson-Downie
Four men in a 1930s recording studio, still from O Brother Where Art Thou

 

I don’t remember precisely the first time I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I may have caught some of it as a kid one afternoon, as my mom watched it, thinking my sister and I were busy. My mom may have let me watch the whole thing when I was still too juvenile to appreciate its picaresque rhythms. I know that I saw at least part of the movie when I was pretty young, because I do remember two things clearly:

  1. I had never seen the white, hooded robes of the KKK before I saw the cross burning scene in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I don’t think I really knew about the KKK at all before I saw this scene.
  2. I had never heard the word “miscegenation” until I heard it in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I vaguely remember my mom explaining to me what it meant, but maybe I just put it together later.

(It bears mentioning that the film, despite being set in the Jim Crow South, doesn’t substantively engage with anti-Black racism. But, then again, neither did my education up to that point.)

I can recall the first time I took pleasure in watching the movie. In my freshman year of highschool, I had English class with a “cool” teacher. He was young and a real hipster, which, in 2007, was still cool to a bunch of fourteen-year-olds. In retrospect, he tried very hard.* (I should say that, at the time, I liked this teacher and thought his assignments were fun. Although, to this day, I’m not sure if I remember his class because he was a good teacher or because his class was the only one I shared with the boy on whom I had a raging crush that year.) After we read The Odyssey, this teacher showed us O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and we had to write about how the film worked as an adaptation. I think he skipped the cross burning scene entirely to avoid getting into any potential trouble with the school.

This English class viewing finally unlocked the film’s humor for me. For months, I couldn’t stop quoting the movie. I made my mom and sister watch it with me again at home fairly soon after I saw it in class. Particular favorite quotes included:

  • “R-U-N-N-O-F-T”
  • “Damn, we’re in a tight spot!” (x3, naturally)
  • “Well ain’t this place a geographical oddity? Two weeks from everywhere!”
  • “They loved him up and turned him into a… a horny toad!” 
  • “I’m the damn paterfamilias!”

Each subsequent viewing of the film has opened up new avenues of enjoyment and frameworks for interpretation. Nothing about the movie changes, of course, but every time I rewatch it, something new reveals itself. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the rare movie that I appreciate not just in different ways but that I appreciate more every time I watch it. I couldn’t Revisit, with a capital R, the film for the twentieth anniversary because I revisit it—casually, like an old friend, with a lowercase r—whenever the fancy takes me. I seem to come back to the film every few years or so. It’s not a well-worn old favorite, exactly, but these repeated viewings over such a long period of time have made the film feel foundational to me in some way.

 

View of the back of three musicians facing an audience, still from O Brother Where Art Thou

 

The film’s influences include Greek myth and epic poetry (specifically, The Odyssey), Depression-era South Americana, and 1930’s Hollywood screwball comedies (notably, the film’s title comes from Preston Sturges’ 1941 Depression-set comedy Sullivan’s Travels**). The film isn’t necessarily interested in recreating any of these things faithfully; rather, the Coen Brothers take these influences, remix them, and present them in sepia-filtered digital photography that looks like the forerunner of the faux-vintage early Instagram aesthetic. O Brother is sort of a satire, sort of an homage, and sort of confounding.

Critics sometimes consider O Brother to be minor Coen Brothers. In a recent ranking of the directors’ films for The Ringer, Sean Fennessey called it, not unkindly, “a vibe more than a movie.” If you’re into that sort of thing, rankings of the Coens’ filmography rather consistently place O Brother somewhere in the lower middle. A consensus appears to have formed that the success of the movie’s Grammy-winning soundtrack, assembled by producer T Bone Burnett, transcended the film. Indeed, most of the pieces published so far for the twentieth anniversary of the film’s release have been about the soundtrack album, not the movie itself.

As chronicled in an anniversary deep dive for Pitchfork published earlier this year, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack had lasting reverberations in the music industry. Music critics widely credit the popular soundtrack for reviving mainstream interest in Appalachian folk and bluegrass music and, perhaps indirectly, leading to the indie folk revival of the late aughts and early ‘10s. Considering the soundtrack in isolation, as an album divorced from the context of the film, is certainly possible and occasionally interesting. 

I like the soundtrack album, which my mom bought after it won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2002. She would play it in the car, where the new CDs usually got put on rotation, and, after a while, in the house when the mood struck her. The soundtrack, along with The Chicks’ album Home (also from 2002), unquestionably served as my introduction to bluegrass and instilled in me a love of the genre. In some ways, my relationship with the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack follows the narrative traced by music and entertainment journalists alike.

My memories of the music and the film aren’t necessarily separate, though. I have a hard time thinking of them independently of one another. I can’t hear “I Am Man of Constant Sorrow” without seeing George Clooney’s Everett launching into the song in front of a tin can microphone, wide-eyed and looking side to side as he searches for Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete (John Tuturro) to come back him up.*** I can’t hear “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby” and not remember the sirens, in their wet, white cotton dresses, sitting in the river and sexily doing laundry. “O Death,” of course, conjures the cross burning scene.

 

Three women in white dresses stand in a river, still from O Brother Where Art Thou

 

As I watched the film most recently, it occurred to me how much the music bolsters the structure of the movie. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a loosely plotted collection of vignettes, ostensibly about Everett returning home after escaping a hard labor sentence. Delmar and Pete come along because, well, all three of them are chained together when Everett makes his escape. This trio’s misadventures constitute the majority of the film, which ultimately doesn’t build a strong narrative arc out of these episodes. If each episode were a Lego brick, the movie would look like… a line of Legos. That is to say, the parts don’t seem to make anything exceptionally interesting when looked at all together.

I don’t feel like the parts necessarily need to add up to anything. The Odyssey is also highly episodic. Do you remember how you read it in class? The teacher would pick the most famous “books”—Circe’s island, the cyclops, Scylla and Carybdis, Odysseus disguising himself as an old man to trick Penelope’s suitors—and you’d read those. The narrative arc of The Odyssey is quite simple, and the excitement comes from the smaller stories within the larger epic.

The music in O Brother complements and reinforces the film’s anecdotal structure. Each vignette (with a smattering of exceptions, because nothing about this film is regular) features a song either sung diegetically in the scene or played non-diegetically over it. I realized that the songs work as markers; I remember the scene by the song or the song by the scene. If pressed, I could probably recount the incidents in the film sequentially because I know the order of the songs. The music organizes the film’s episodes in my memory, and the consistency of the musical style creates a tonal throughline.

Scholars know that ancient epic Greek poetry, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, was sung. Epic poetry was an oral tradition before the stories got written down, and bards would use established systems of meter and melody to semi-improvise the performance of a tale. The bard would know the scenarios and motifs of a story and fit them into the schematic song as he performed. I know film is a fixed medium—what’s depicted on screen doesn’t vary—but watching O Brother, Where Art Thou? after a few years feels like this: I know the music, and the plot details and themes fit with it differently every time I reȅxperience the story.

As my observations and musings about the film pile up with each new viewing, I wonder if any of my thoughts about it will ever cohere into a unifying theory. I don’t subscribe to the idea that any piece of art is a puzzle to be solved, but repeatedly searching for new meaning in a work can sometimes lead to a sense of holistic understanding. But the more I watch O Brother, the more I am convinced that the film is designed to resist comprehensive interpretation. The ideas I’ve laid out here about the integral role of the soundtrack won’t “crack” the film. They’re just my latest reflections on it, prompted by my twentieth anniversary rewatch.

Perhaps the next time I come back to O Brother, and I notice something new, I’ll return to this blog post and add my thoughts. The discursive nature of the movie inspires digressive discussion. I’m never sure what fresh train of thought the movie will elicit or what old memories it will resurface. Only one thing about watching the film remains inevitable. “Man of Constant Sorrow” will be stuck in my head on a loop by the time I get to the end credits.

 

Three men hold onto a coffin as they float in a flooded valley, still from O Brother Where Art Thou

 

 

*A peek into my writing process: Did I Google this teacher while I was writing this, starting down a procrastination rabbit hole? Yes. Is this teacher pretty much exactly how I remembered him, based on his Twitter and his LinkedIn? Yes.

**In Sullivan’s Travels, the main character is a film director who wants to make a serious, social-issues drama called, you guessed it, O Brother, Where Art Thou. The studio heads want him to make an escapist comedy instead, “with a little sex in it,” because they think it will sell better.

***Can we take one moment to pause and appreciate how well George Clooney lip syncs for his life?? Masterclass. Also, for the purpose of this blog post, all song titles refer to the soundtrack versions of the songs.