But I will indulge myself a moment, because today I watched Robert Zemeckis's Here—the boldest Goddamn movie of the year, in its way, just a real achievement, and one that deserves a full review—but perhaps just as importantly, I also watched I Saw the TV Glow, the third feature (second anyone's heard of) from Jane Schoenbrun, the follow-up to their torturously boring and bad We're All Going To the World's Fair; and, in tandem, they very briefly restored my faith in the state of cinema, one being a fearless late-style swing from a tottering master that does some truly new shit, the other being the kind of redemption I genuinely want to see from a filmmaker who might've burned me terribly in the past, but is willing to evolve towards good, exciting work. And this feeling was shattered, because 2024 now bears the ineradicable stain of producing Anora as America's putative Best Picture of the year, and now it's all just a bunch of morbid considerations about that whole "state of cinema" thing: the possibility that Zemeckis might never make another movie (because hardly anybody's seen Here and I do not think its reputation will grow going forward); the possibility that Shoenbrun's literal physical well-being could be jeopardized, let alone that of their career; and the certainty that Sean Baker is going to go on to keep making the worst motherfucking movies in the world for decades and decades to come.
Anyway, we'll get to I Saw the TV Glow, but I also watched Marielle Heller's Nightbitch, and now they're together, because they're both obtuse horror movies or something. I'd say it's because they're both about nighttime, but I believe Nightbitch takes place mostly, like at 3:1 ratio, during the day. Oh, whatever, it's fundamentally arbitrary.
It's not clear whether it was Nightbitch source novelist Rachel Yoder, or its writer-director Marielle Heller, or its coterie of producers, but clearly it was decided that what women needed was their own 1994's Wolf, though I certainly can't tell you what all these women thought women must've done to deserve that. And, somehow, the results are even less impressive: both Wolf and Nightbitch are using a story of canid transformation as a means of actually pursuing a fantasy about middle-aged rebellion and rejuvenation, and, as we weigh each film against the other, Nightbitch ought to have an advantage, because it's at least not embarrassed of being a fantasy movie like Wolf was; yet it's counter-intuitively interested in being a fantasy movie even less; and while Wolf is surely not good at "being a werewolf movie," and does not deliver on the genre pleasures a movie about Jack Nicholson playing a werewolf has blatantly promised, at least it did have Jack Nicholson fucking a woman half his age and pissing on his corporate rival's shoes, whereas Nightbitch isn't concerned with the genre pleasures of either the werewolf movie or those of the middle-aged rebellion story. For the long, repetitive middle half the most Amy Adams's (oh boy) unnamed mother (credited thusly, though I could've sworn she received a name) ever gets out of being a human dog, or a rebellious middle-aged woman, is... well, I guess let's just say that Heller must actually hate cats, but at least the storytelling in the corresponding sequence of Can You Ever Forgive Me? suggested she understood the concept of not hating cats. Her nighttime photography isn't as risibly bad as Mike Nichols's. Let's give Heller that much.
Now, I don't outright despise Nightbitch. I would like to imagine that if the right person found this at the right time—someone for whom the possibility of becoming a dog (for no particularly well-established reason that affords the movie a real lore or anything like that), and thereby escaping the stultifying duties of being a mother to a two year-old, sounded (emotionally) like a swell trade—then to them it would be great, and that would be that, and I'd be earnestly glad for them, even if they would be a rather statistically unlikely person. (It bums me out, because I root for Heller, but this is one of those times that a made-for-streaming release actually got screwed real, real bad by being promoted to theatrical release, with a lifetime box office gross only somewhat higher than the value of my house.) But I suppose the other way to frame the problems here is that with Nightbitch what we have is a movie that doesn't give a shit about its horror-fantasy conceit besides some imagery here and there, and its only real use for it is as a hook for—quite possibly solely as an excuse to put a swear word in title of!—a domestic drama. Simultaneously, it still has the most desperate need for that horror-fantasy conceit, and to rely upon it to fill up scenes, because its domestic drama is almost literally unbelievably flavorless. And that's quite unfortunate, because that's been Heller's deal two movies running now, though at least A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood's filigree was more interesting, namely Tom Hanks in high mimic mode playing Fred Rogers as Therapeutic Jesus, plus, somehow the movie about Mr. Rogers had more fun with the infliction of horror-fantasy imagery upon its psychologically-crumbling protagonist.
But I'll be honest, I just don't recognize these people, and while such people probably do exist, spending time with them is very empty. (Adams at least has an emptiness to work with, afforded a character study of her unfulfilled wife; Scoot McNairy does nothing whatsoever with the most wretched nullity imaginable, who doesn't even get to be a vibrant caricature of an unaccountably lame husband, just this sucking void I think anyone would be forgiven if they'd have preferred to see a werewolf rip his stupid face off. Then again, Adams's wife is only a chaotic swarm of character and backstory elements herself, some of which feel ill-matched with one another, and all of which are slapped together notions that don't ever cohere into anything resembling a fully-rendered character.* It also takes some effort to leave aside that the revitalization of her artistic talents finds her, obviously, working principally out of her home, and working out of her home has been, however hypothetically, her big problem. Her bigger problem is her parenting style, probably, and this movie that's a heartcry on behalf of put-upon mothers who feel burdened by society to be perfect and patient is, paradoxically, a small part of the problem it critiques. But let us also leave that aside.)
The thing is, I'd be happy to not kibbitz the movie if it had any snap. But it kind of barely has any content to speak of at all: no real horror element (Adams's reactions to her body's changes are so blase it feels like some avant-garde symbolist thing, which I suppose it is, but without any other aspect of the movie bothering to support that mode); no rapport or even personality to share between the two leads; and nothing like a plot, nor even anything that feels like an escalating series of events. It has themes, of course, and tons of them, mostly some kind of very vague mystical idea about humans being animals at bottom, and hence if not the sum of their biology then at least needing to root their psyches in their biology before anything else; and somehow it uses that as a platform almost entirely for some stunningly didactic lectures (and this movie is di. dac. tic.—it's been awhile since I've seen any movie so badly harmed by voiceover narration) about social ills and, like, specific governmental policy. Going back to the movie that made me root for Heller, and continues to get me to do so, it's as if, as this film's screenwriter, she were taking her cues not so much from the Nicole Holofcener who wrote the tough-minded and hard-nosed Can You Ever Forgive Me? for her, but more like the Nicole Holofcener who wrote the tiresomely-on-message, saintly-victim section of The Last Duel.
I suppose this is at its best when it's just a comedy with a goofy premise (and there are some pretty mordantly amusing quick-cut rhythmic montages, regarding the dreariness of Adams's life, and the "my body sure is producing more hairs than are seemly" non-reaction reactions can at least be funny); and you can't accuse it of not being able to laugh at itself. I mean, goodness, Heller needle drops "Dare To Be Stupid," and I appreciate that the movie indeed does so dare—I don't even really mean this sarcastically, I wish it did it way more, and just wallowed in the possibilities of having an antisocial dog woman rather than barely letting you distinguish between daydreams and the middlingly-weird junk Adams is doing in public, like eating without hands, which any observer would assume she was doing to amuse her dumbass kid. But: "[The woman you married] died in childbirth" is, in fairness, a great line. I sure wish it were in a domestic drama that had faith in domestic drama as a genre, or, for that matter, a werewolf movie that could say the same; I thought she was at least going to turn the kid into a dog and abscond into the night, you know? I think there's an actual fairy tale with that plot, and to the extent the movie is activating ideas about the unfairness of the human life cycle—which, as I am always ready to mention, is a tremendously unfair one—I don't think it's ever actually comparing human reproduction to that of dogs, even though the shittiness of being human, particulary a human female, is so readily thrown into sharp relief when you look at a fucking mommy dog who dispenses with the entirety of her maternal obligation in about the time it takes to even bring a human baby to term. Actually about half the time. So yeah, there's something there, if you wanted to have scratched the surface at all.
Score: 4/10
*Amy Adams is a museum curator in a bad movie revolving around her decisions regarding a child? No, sorry, this is Nightbitch, you're looking for Nocturnal Animals, you idiot.
I Saw the TV Glow has just enough of a plot that it's incumbent on me to summarize it, or at least introduce the various proper nouns of the movie's story so that you know what the fuck it is I could possibly be talking about: in 1996, young Owen (presently Ian Foreman, eventually Justice Smith) makes the acquaintance of the slightly ("slightly") older teen Maddy (Jack Haven, still d/b/a Bridget Lundy-Payne for this one), she more sullen, he more gawky, and she introduces him to the half-hour basic cable, girl-coded science-fantasy show that becomes their mutual great obsession, The Pink Opaque. They bond over this show and only over this show; Maddy, a lesbian in a small town and never happy, tries to get Owen, the closest thing she has to a friend, to run away with her to somewhere more vibrant; he agrees, but in the end, quails in the face of the unknown. Years pass. Maddy comes back. She's discovered something in the meantime, and it's something she thinks they've each known all along: their lives weren't real. Only the show was real, and they were its stars, trapped in a gnostic depression dimension of false flesh by the stratagem of its big bad, Mr. Melancholy. But Maddy knows a way back.
And, okay, fair is fucking fair, guys. This is one of the largest leaps in quality you could ever hope for between a filmmaker's first widely-seen, "real" feature and their second one—I'm not sure if I've ever calculated any bigger one—and it is such an enormous improvement over We're All Going To the World's Fair, that you can't see that from here anymore. This is true, despite it being (hell, even because it is) a sort of crypto-remake of World's Fair. (Or, again, fair being fair, "a variation on a theme regarding World's Fair.") Well, either way, it uses the same basic recipe, but with higher-grade ingredients all down the list: it's about a personality-free loser who replaces that void with a piece of pop cultural junk, except now it gives the personality-free loser someone to have face-to-face conservations with; the piece of pop cultural junk is explicably enticing now, even if still looks kind of bad, and remains somewhat intentionally nebulous; the encroaching psychohorror actually encroaches this time, in interesting visual and affective ways; and as far as being a trans narrative goes, it's infinitely more articulate and doesn't feel nearly so much like affinity fraud. The difference between "small budget" and "by all the evidence, literally no budget" is obviously palpable, too, from ways as big as this movie having legitimately very awesome cinematography (courtesy Eric K. Yue) that captures the exact overlap between suburban anomie and the spooky secrets of nighttime, to as medium-sized as Sofi Marshall's editing being a real treasure in the more psychologically frenetic passages, to as small as our hero simply leaving the mother fucking house from time to time. And not just to vlog to nobody.
Even the remaining weaknesses are turned more towards being strengths, though "the first act of this 100 minute movie is 57 minutes and 10 seconds long (I checked)" probably does not represent best practice, even if I have to grudgingly admit it works; and while it is a strategy, for a movie that revolves around a pseudo-Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but is actually about the most pitiful fans of a pseudo-Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to have such extravagantly stilted dialogue rhythms, surely there must be some kind of happy medium before you hit overwritten Whedonistic neo-screwballery, right?* Still, those do function as an expression of mood, atmosphere, and psychology; presumably, Foreman's performance as the young version of our hero is supposed to, but while I am not for a second blaming this kid for being a vacant, slack-jawed bore—I am blaming his director—it's not great when you await, eagerly, the arrival of a screen presence such as Justice Smith's. Perhaps especially with this Justice Smith performance, because even if he's doing vacant, slack-jawed bore at a properly professional level, his is not a voice amenable to the mumbletronic put-on he's invented on his character's behalf. There is also the matter of Smith playing the "two years later" version of Foreman's Owen for several scenes running (and Foreman's Owen is thirteen or maybe even twelve), and that starts pushing even my "eh, it's just a movie, it's all artifice" ethos to its breaking point, even before Smith engages in an exchange with his mom that begins "Can I stay up tonight to watch The Pink Opaque?", which I would like to finish for her, "Of course you can honey, you retired from the factory several years ago," though "not recognizing this person, who does not remotely resemble her son," would be an equally good option for her. (Haven, for their part, suffers only slightly less at "playing 14, being 30" in the early running, but their performance resolves much more readily, and they are crackerjack once their moment arrives, and they get to drop a long, hyper-intense monologue regarding their theories about reality on our heads.)
But the big strength is maybe new, and while maybe World's Fair sucks so much for so many other reasons I wouldn't have bothered recognizing it, it was what that movie needed above all, so I find it pretty hard to believe it was there and still eluded me: but I Saw the TV Glow genuinely does have a sense of humor, a kind of a mean one, about its characters' emptiness. (Owen's direct address assuring us that he's "an adult" now is really funny, thanks to the visual foreground gag that suggests "being an adult" for this dweeb means "owning a flatscreen TV." I feel that "do you like girls"/"I think I like TV shows" is also one superb dialogue couplet. Honestly? I'm willing to accept that Smith playing the 9th grade version of himself is 100% deliberate, though it still comes too early in the journey of this film's bleak comedy to land, or at least land properly, as the "joke" it might well be. Now if he'd played the 7th grade version of himself...)
Maybe counterintuitively, though, that sense of humor affords us a permission to actually feel sympathy, even empathy, for these poor souls, rather than bored, increasingly-resentful contempt; and, again going back to World's Fair, the much more complete narrative Schoenbrun's built for themselves here actually makes it clear enough why these characters haven't been able to develop a single real personality between them, and along with the aesthetic switch from "YouTube neorealism" to "thank God, an actual movie," it allows things to actually rise to the level of metaphor for—obviously—what it's very intentionally about (fandom, nonconformity), or whatever dissatisfactions you've personally got with your life that make you wish you lived another (and indeed, "not being born a girl" is, I suppose, one of mine, though I don't think to the extent of gender dysphoria, I'd simply have rather been, if that makes sense). It's a vastly stronger emotional experience, whichever way you slice it, and since most movies would be when compared to World's Fair, let's agree it's a strong emotional experience, period. The horror itself is quite restrained, but in an intelligent way—the most frightening thing in the whole film is Smith arriving home to find the overcooked flickering TV lights dancing across his father's immobile, hostile stare, just this real nice and freaky image—and the main way it manifests is how it subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly, I mean, they go to "Void High") makes Smith's drearily shitty real world seem so fake, so while Haven's re-entry into the story is truly insane, it could be persuasive. And I gotta tell you, The Pink Opaque's monsters fucking rule, Mr. Melancholy when we get him in particular, all kind of a perfect blend of full-on garbage-ass kid's adventure television (with the analog horror that I Saw the TV Glow merrily exploits), plus that soupcon of modern technology that punches their nightmarish grotesquerie even further, in ways that "shouldn't" be possible for such quintessentially 90s creations.
It misses thoroughgoing excellence, because Shoenbrun is still figuring out all the differences between "a slow burn" and "tedious"; but there is excellence within it. This is a lot of growth, and they have been studying their Grant Morrison, which I immensely appreciate—tweaked towards a bit more hopelessness, this is their last issue of Animal Man, and boy, is it ever Flex fucking Mentallo, how am I possibly the only person who noticed?**—and this leads into a very perfect ending regarding the final death of childhood openness and adolescent hope, that is, unfortunately, succeeded by seven more minutes of movie that I sure wish like hell were not there.
Score: 7/10
*This is probably pigeonholing it too forcefully. It's obviously Buffy, down to the freaking font, but also a little goofier—oh my, even so—but it also obviously airs on Nickelodeon. It's also a half-hour, and seems to have no supporting cast, so what is this, just Buffy and Xander? Oof. Nevertheless, if Shoenbrun mocked an episode up for shits and giggles, I'd watch it.
**Yes, it is also "the unhappier, and much less generically Campbellian and more obviously trans, Matrix."
I would play the SHIT out of a character named "Nightbitch" in Killer Instinct or Mortal Kombat.
ReplyDeleteYou did just make me realize that part of my disappointment with the movie is that a title like that promises something with a little more extremity.
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