Movies
The Movie Club, Entry 14.
Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Lorenzo Sisti/Neon and Getty Images Plus.
In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.
Ciao, Commendatores,
To the question of which 2023 performances have most stayed with me, the easy answers are several that have already been mentioned and discussed here at some length: Lily Gladstone, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Michelle Williams, Franz Rogowski, Sandra Hüller. To these I would also add Cillian Murphy’s transcendent turn in Oppenheimer, but I’ve talked enough about Oppenheimer. This year’s Cannes winners, Merve Dizdar and Kōji Yakusho, from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses and Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, were very deserving … but no reader is going to be able to see those movies until well into 2024. (They received under-the-radar qualifying releases in December, which … well, I’ve already written about that increasingly irritating phenomenon.)
Instead, I’d like to single out two performances from earlier in the year that will probably not win any awards but that continue to provide me immense amounts of joy. And they also happen to share some conceptual DNA. The first is Chris Messina’s wonderfully foulmouthed turn as super-agent David Falk in Ben Affleck’s Air, a chronicle of Nike’s creation of the Air Jordan sneaker, an event which truly did change the world forever, at least for those in my generation. Earlier this year it seemed like Air (which is on my Top 20 list, and which, yes, I’ve rewatched many, many times) might get more love come awards season, but, as often happens, other big hitters came out of the woodwork and eclipsed it as the year wore on.
Messina’s performance has really stuck with me, however, and it’s not just because my son quotes his “I will bury you and light you on fire and dance and piss on your grave” speech almost every day. (I probably shouldn’t admit that in public, should I?) These pop-historical corporate dramedies, of which there were quite a few this year, often struggle to create real emotional stakes for their characters and their actions. Yes, you’re risking it all—your reputation, your job, your company’s profit margin, the approval of your bosses, etc.—on a newfangled product which the world hasn’t seen before. Big deal! We, 30 years later, know the product was a success! So why should we care? Well, in the case of Air, we care about Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) because we know that if his Jordan pitch fails, Michael Jordan’s manager is waiting in the wings, ready to eat him, bones and all. In constant full-on rage-spiral mode, Messina makes Falk both terrifying and hilarious. The movie works beautifully for me on multiple levels, in part because the performance are all so strong. Viola Davis plays Michael Jordan’s mother Deloris, and in her small handful of scenes brings a necessary underlying tenderness to the proceedings. But without Messina, Air would just be a moderately entertaining series of incidents. He provides the wall of fire against which mere drama becomes melodrama.
At the New York Film Critics Circle Awards in late November, a few of us tried to muster support for Glenn Howerton’s performance in BlackBerry, but we were powerless against the strength of Big May December. (Just kidding—Charles Melton’s great, too.) Here then is another pop-historical corporate dramedy, this time about the creation of the BlackBerry, the Canadian smartphone that ultimately paved the way for the iPhone and so, in some ways, destroyed all our lives forever. Howerton plays Jim Balsillie, the Harvard-educated, phone-throwing apex predator who’s hired to help run Research in Motion, the scrappy little Waterloo, Ontario, startup run by a couple of unmotivated nerds. He steps in thinking that he’s joining a real company with a real business plan, only to discover that these overeducated dingdongs are more into Movie Night with their buds-slash-employees than actually creating working products.
This prompts outrage on his part, but it also generates terror. What I particularly love about Howerton’s performance is that even as Balsillie maintains full-on shark mode, we sense that he’s genuinely afraid of what will happen if he fails—to the company, but also to him. This is an underrated insight into how the corporate world operates: less through greed and more through fear (which then expresses itself as greed). Watching Howerton’s intense glare bounce off the amiable, brilliant Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and the ever-so-supportive Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson, who also directed) was among the most entertaining couple of hours I’ve had at a movie this year.
When I saw BlackBerry, I assumed Howerton was wearing a bald cap, much as his co-star Baruchel sported a not-very-convincing blond wig. It turns out the actor actually shaved most of his head for the part. Still, the vague unreality of his hairline actually added something to the part. It didn’t feel like a realistic portrayal. It was somewhat closer to sketch comedy. That might sound like a backhanded compliment (no actor in a real movie wants to hear they’re doing sketch comedy), but in this case it isn’t. That slight edge of unreality is occasionally required to allow actors to go big—to tap into the kinds of emotions that pure naturalism sometimes struggles with. This is incredibly hard to pull off without veering into shtick.
This line between authenticity and realism is something I’ve thought a lot about this year, particularly in regard to Adam Driver’s starring turn in Michael Mann’s Ferrari, which I think is the best performance Driver has ever given. Does his silver hair look realistic? No. Does he genuinely look like a pudgy, 59-year-old Italian man? No, not really. Is the accent perfect? Hell no. But dear god, how I love this performance. The sheer determination on Enzo’s face, the unwillingness to fail, the way he closes himself off to anything that could puncture the wall he’s built around himself—save for that one heartbreaking moment early on, when he visits his dead son’s grave—I found it all so compelling. I am quite simply in awe of the blustery drive of this performance, which seems to capture something about the charisma of someone like this, who can convince the people around him to do all sorts of things, even go to their deaths. I’d follow this man anywhere.
Five years ago I sat here in the Slate Movie Club bloviating about Christian Bale’s performance in Vice and how in his efforts to perfectly replicate Dick Cheney’s appearance and voice and cadence, the actor lost something essential about the man. It gave me no pleasure to admit that Vice, for me, was dead on arrival in part because my favorite working actor gave an empty, albeit technically accomplished, performance.
This year, something similar happened with Bradley Cooper’s perfect reconstruction of Leonard Bernstein’s voice and cadence in Maestro, a movie that is adored by many of my friends but still manages to leave me cold. Watching the film, it was clear that Cooper had studied hours of footage of Bernstein to see how the legendary conductor presented himself to the world. But I didn’t get any sense of what Bernstein was like in real life, in intimate settings. It felt like he was “on” the whole time. Yes, I think this is partly what Maestro is about: Here is a man who was always playing a part. I understood that intellectually, but not on emotionally. To be clear, I find Maestro somewhat disappointing but also interesting and worthwhile, while I find Vice (mostly) dire. But both extremely accomplished, “authentic” performances are left in the dust by a heartbreaking and riveting Adam Driver in a gray wig and a fat suit.
Which brings me to Dan’s “interruption.”
Yes, Ferrari does have a scene where Enzo Ferrari’s mom says, “The wrong son died.” And yes, this does echo the “wrong kid died” line from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. And yes, as Dan notes, this was an actual thing Ferrari’s mom apparently said all the time. I chuckled at the line, too. I even asked Michael Mann about it when I interviewed him. He hadn’t seen Walk Hard. (The interview is here, but that exchange wasn’t included in the final piece.)
And you know what? Good for him! I’m glad Michael Mann isn’t making creative decisions based on whether Judd Apatow got there first. I’m glad he’s focused on making his movies his way and not worrying about what people might mock him for. It’s Michael Mann’s tunnel vision that makes him the director that he is, and that made it possible for him to finally make this film after 30 years of trying. That tunnel vision has served him well throughout his career. It’s what made him start using digital video earlier than almost any other director, a decision for which he was criticized mightily at the time. I remember when I first saw Ali in 2001, I was shocked that he needle-dropped Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” at the end of the scene of Malcolm X’s assassination, when just a few years earlier, Spike Lee had used the same song in the run-up to the assassination scene in his biopic Malcolm X. What were you thinking, Michael Mann? What a misstep! And yet … watching the two films today, both scenes are beautiful, and both pictures are wonderful. Shockingly, it turns out these music choices can coexist. And frankly, today, it seems like such a bizarre thing to have gotten worked up over.
And despite my knowing chuckle during Ferrari, the line doesn’t bother me at all. Because for starters, the film doesn’t use it as some kind of great insight into Enzo Ferrari’s lifelong drive to be the best, the way a more conventional biopic might. It does reveal something about his contentious and often very funny relationship with his mother, played by a terrific Daniela Piperno. Ferrari is in fact often deliberately hilarious, even alongside all its heartbreak and its great, bellowing confrontations. It’s an opera, really. There’s even an extended performance from La Traviata in it, just to make that clear. Even though the movie leaves me a total wreck every time I watch it, I find it stupendously entertaining.
But also: Spoofs (spooves?) do not automatically disqualify other movies that may stray into their territory! I spent way too many years listening to people tell me that they couldn’t take The Last Temptation of Christ seriously because they’d seen The Life of Brian. John Boorman’s Excalibur, the greatest King Arthur movie of them all, came out just six years after Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the second-greatest King Arthur movie of them all, and there were some who dinged it for being a bit too reminiscent of the Python version at the time. But cinema and the world would both be lesser places today if John Boorman had said, “Well, on second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.” I even remember some folks telling me at the time of its release that Michael Mann’s film version of Miami Vice (among the greatest of all movies) was too serious, too self-important, too unironic in a world where the comedy film reboot of Starsky & Hutch existed. I love you, Dan, but in 15 or 20 years nobody’s going to care that Ferrari has a line of dialogue in it that Walk Hard made fun of. The film will live or die on its own terms, not some other movie’s.
Before I close out, I do want to note something about Machine Dazzle, the visionary designer Mark discussed in his last entry. Machine Dazzle actually created the crazy costumes for Once Within a Time, the wild new Godfrey Reggio movie that premiered this October. The film, running just 52 minutes long, is a retelling of the Adam and Eve story from the point of view of technology and the digital revolution. (Sort of. It’s a Godfrey Reggio movie, so it’s all up for interpretation.) It looks amazing, with each frame consisting of multiple layers of models and miniatures and process shots and random digital doodles. Machine Dazzle’s costumes are somehow both patchwork and elemental—round and square cages around people’s heads, elegant robes that become tree roots, elaborate headdresses made of antlers that leave you guessing whether they’re reaching for the stars or summoning forth demons. And it all stars … Mike Tyson? Anyway, a film like that was always going to be a tough sell, but it did make me a little sad to see it get almost completely ignored. A new movie, probably the last movie, from the director of Koyaanisqatsi—and nobody noticed.
I myself go through waves of despair and hope over the future of our industry on what sometimes seems like an hourly basis. But here’s something that does give me hope: The fact that the Slate Movie Club is still going strong—driven by Dana’s passion and intelligence, Dan’s rigor and open-mindedness, and the whole Slate team’s diligence. I give up cinema forever on Monday. I’m back in the theater by Sunday. We all know it’s our deadly passion—our terrible joy.
Brake later,
Bilge
Comedy
Movie Club 2023
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