UPSTREAM, DOWNSTREAM: #1
"ORIGIN," "WOLFS," "MONSTERS," "THE PERFECT COUPLE," "SLOW HORSES," "HIS THREE DAUGHTERS," A QUICK APPRAISAL OF "THE APPRENTICE," and LESS THAN A MEGADOSE OF "MEGALOPOLIS"
(Above: An ad for Francis Ford Coppola’s lastest film, Javier Bardem in a sex scene from Monsters on Neflix, and some Goethe.)
Below is the last of the Q and A with poet, essayist, and Greek & Roman scholar Anne Carson conducted by Kate Dwyer for The Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that our experience of time has something to do with the way that we pay attention? Do you think that someone who reads a lot would experience time differently from someone looking at screens all day?
CARSON
That seems to imply judgment. I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that we seek out ways to make time stop. That only happens in moments of total attention, which is why we pursue them. I suppose that can happen when you watch a movie on Netflix. Or when you’re deep in the midst of composing your best poem. Either of them can provide a focus of attention that you can enter, disappear into. My only interest in dealing with time is to find ways to make it stop. Because when it doesn’t stop, you’re in boredom.
You’re watching it go by, and there’s nothing happening in it enough to fill it. Enough to take you away from misery. I don’t find much of a middle ground between boredom and whatever the other thing is … immortality, I guess. Forgetting time.
To be out of time, to be in that other state, is completely fun. So fun that you forget worrying about time.
INTERVIEWER
Do you spend hours at a time in that state?
CARSON
Minutes maybe, if I’m lucky.
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Francis Ford Coppola talking to The New Yorker about the books he read in preparation for writing and directing Megalopolis:
“Elective Affinities is like a formula of the dynamics created by a man, a woman, the other man, and the other woman when they come together as a kind of chemical reaction. It’s a great book. I wanted to make a film of it at one point. Will I? God knows what’s happening—I don’t even understand my life or why I’m still doing it.
“Goethe is important to me for a million reasons. He was the one who said that architecture was frozen music. There is a scene in Megalopolis where the main characters, Cesar and Julia, are walking around on beams five thousand feet above the earth, and Julia says, ‘You taught me that all art is controlled time’—which I believe. If you’re an artist, you don’t adhere to real time. It’s only if you’re a lawyer that you have to worry about it. As an artist, you can control it. Which I feel I do all the time. There have been moments in my life when I was so happy and fulfilled and then I had to go to work or something, and I just stopped time. I know I did.”
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Welcome to a new series I’m doing here at SES/SUMS IT UP about the shows I’ve streamed - or sometimes seen in a cinema - which all, it seems, end up in a format that enables us to stream them. I still like the communal aspect of cinema and the scope of flickering images on a movie screen, but I do love streaming things on my computer because I have control of the time it takes to watch them. Bingeing a show is like reading chapters in a book - which is also about controlling time in its way. When I stream something, I can even go back over scenes I want to see again, lines I’ve not quite understood, the emotional thrust-and-parry of a pair of actors as they come to terms with the incongruity at the heart of their artistic endeavor which is the unsheathing of character by the sheathing of self no matter their method. The slightness of TikTok does not interest me in the slightest (nor its) but the scope (that word again) of the tenuous tenacity of the tick and the tock of time does whether it is the way that narratives are created by writers and directors and actors or the way that I can now segment it in the manner we have come to view such creative endeavors. We have learned to live with what computer scientists and electronic engineers have devised to view in further ways the collapsable, expandable time that artists have always been able to create.
I hope to be succinct in these capsule reviews so that it does not, in fact, take up too much of your own time to read them.
“Downstream” is the term I’m using for a mostly negative take. “Upstream” is the one for a mostly positive one.
Let’s start positively.
UPSTREAM
(Above: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Ava DuVernay photographed by Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times.)
Ava DuVernay’s Origin available at Amazon Prime - she directed her own screenplay based on Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - is a kind of essay written cinematically. It fractures time, folds it in on itself, elongates it. It is written in well-framed phrases. Then in run-on sentences. It is poetic. Blunt. Sentimental. Academic. Historical. Melodramatic. Well-woven, edited, doled-out. It made me more deeply believe that time is not linear but takes place simultaneously. It is about America’s systemic bigotry weaponized against its Black citizens, Nazi Germany’s systematic massacre of its Jewish ones, and India’s systemic indecency toward its Dalit populace. It makes Wilkerson, a Black American writer, the center of her own unraveling of racism as she remolds it into the rigidity of class.
Narrative time is itself remolded just as her perceptions are when she confronts the murder of the Black teenager Trayvon Martin at the hands of a Latino man attempting to protect a white neighborhood. Her research - as does DuVernay’s masterful, deeply moving, deeply mindful film - takes us to Germany to find out about a Nazi party member she spots in a vintage photo who, having fallen in love with a Jewish woman, is refusing to lift his hand in the Nazi salute in a crowd of others doing just that. There are cultural anthropologists who go undercover in segregated mid-20th Century Natchez, Mississippi. An old white man is interviewed as he remembers his childhood when a Black friend was not allowed to touch the water in a whites-only swimming pool which is one of the quietest, most poetic, and deeply tragic cinematic scenes I have ever witnessed. DuVernay’s film is one of the most poetic itself, yet it is so stringently so that it in some ways reminded me, scene-by-scene, of stanzas stacked up in an Anne Carson translation from the Greek - or transcribed from the intransigence of the poet’s own imagination. Wilkerson was married to a white man who himself went undercover culturally within her family. Another white man comes to her aid and is wearing a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap. Her sister talks sense to her. She listens. We do. We transcribe our own lives into these.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is brilliantly nuanced as Wilkerson in the throes of the personal tragedies of two deaths that rock her world but who gathers herself by surrendering finally to her deepest relationship: writing. DeVernay has indeed made a film about what it is to be a writer as you become unaware of time when you’re in-the-zone of working as time itself sweeps you up in its thrall until you are the throe with which it has to grapple. This is a film about grappling. I’m still grappling with how much it moved me. It’s hard to write about.
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DOWNSTREAM
The Perfect Couple on Netflix is about more than one couple and is certainly not perfect. It was, in fact, full of both hoary and whore-y plot turns. I didn’t believe any of it but most of all I didn’t believe I kept watching the thing until the end to keep convincing myself it was as bad as I thought it was while wondering if it would get any better (it didn’t). I also continued to watch it to see if Nicole Kidman’s wigs would get any better (they also didn’t) and if Isabelle Adjani’s puffy face work and filler would “go down” during the shoot (alas it didn’t as well). There were two good performances. Sam Nivola was lovely and sensitive in his portrayal of Nicole’s youngest son whose daddy was played by Liev Schreiber who was also professionally slumming in this as he ironically played a louche, stoned rich guy who liked lazily to sleep around. Donna Lynne Champlin was also fun to watch and seemed to be the audience’s avatar in her portrayal of the police detective with a “can you believe this shit” churlish charm. The series is a waste of time but there are some evenings when time is there to be wasted.
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DOWNSTREAM
I have loved Slow Horses in all its previous seasons but this one seemed like a placeholder, a diagram written out on the Dry-Erase White Board in the Writers Room. It was as perfunctory as it was violent, filled with body counts and a certain number of pages needed so the actors could earn their money and Apple TV could get its clicks from those of us who have become fans of the show. There were previews for the next season at the end of this one’s six-episode arc. I hope it’s better. Gary Oldman continues, however, to give one of the great “television” performances. It’s as if Peter Falk had been cast in the Maggie Smith role in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van.
UPSTREAM
(Above: Nicholas Alexander Chavez as Lyle and Cooper Koch as Erik in Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story.)
I am not a fan of Ryan Murphy’s assembly line school of factory filmmaking. There no longer, in fact, seems to be enough time in the day for him to spend focusing on all that gets packaged in his factory to be shipped out to us. Some of the “product” he produces seems like the chocolates stuffed in Lucy and Ethel’s mouths the umpteenth time you’ve seen that episode of I Love Lucy where they are standing on that other assembly line. You appreciate the sloppy precision of it all but it no longer really holds your interest.
So I went into Monsters, the Netflix series about Lyle and Eric Menendez and the patricide that it tries to explain to us, mostly dreading it. But I had heard from friends I trusted that Murphy was back in fine form. So I dived in and am glad I did. He and his writers and directors fashioned a series good enough to merit the talents of the cast - especially Cooper Koch as Eric Menendez. He is the great-grandson of producer Howard Koch who ran production at Paramount Pictures from 1964 - 1966 where he then housed his production company which produced such films as The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, and the two Airplane! movies. But such a show biz pedigree made me think Cooper might be a bit too slick - almost schlocky - in his portrayal of Eric, which could have worked since, let’s face it, he’s starring in a Ryan Murphy production which so often has the sheen of schlock about it. But he gives a deeply troubling and complicated and layered performance. He is also openly gay and that self-awareness gave a subtle swagger to the odd sweetness he brought to the role that could just as quickly curdle with a quickening that could give the screen a little quake of carnality. There was something sinister stirring - but was it within him or us as we watched him? He made us feel - well, he made me feel so - complicit in a leering acknowledgement of his allure.
Nicholas Alexander Chavez is also good as Lyle but that part was a bit too on-the-nose and showy and over-the-top thus so was his performance for me - and his fake bald-pate was as bad as Nicole Kidman’s wig.
Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny play the parents. Sevigny seems never to be cast in a part so much as her listlessness is enlisted to instill some sort of reality into a role as if she just can’t be bothered to act. Bardem is operatic in that off-key way that a Murphy show so often calls for. He’s more monstrous in his way than the sons are, and in a hotel scene when he dons a golden kotinos as he orders a male prostitute to crawl over to him and his erection made me think that maybe that’s how Murphy must treat the Netflix executives except they are the ones leaving the money on his bedside table. Yet irony is not one of Murphy’s selling points. Unintended risibility has come to be. And in that scene I laughed out loud.
Nathan Lane as the closeted Dominick Dunne in another scene with a waiter at the unnamed Chateau Marmont broke my heart in a way that the series was incapable of doing. Dunne always became the needed heart - the broken one - of each heartless trial he covered because of his own personal history of his beloved daughter being murdered and the man who strangled and beat her getting off with manslaughter. His mission in life was to bring his broken heart to other trials. The series reminded me how much I loved Nick - we were colleagues at Vanity Fair - and that broken heart of his.
Were the Menendez brothers broken themselves by their own histories or just sociopaths? The fact that I am ending this review with that question means that the series worked in its way - maybe even in ways that Murphy didn’t want it to work. Another unintended result of his product line.
They are still - for now - doing time.
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UPSTREAM
My Three Daughters evokes Chekhov’s title Three Sisters (because they are). It seems purposeful. The Netflix film, written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, is Chekhovian in its moody, introspective ennui and the intrusive longing that gets in the way of grief and regret and resolve. The sisters who are thrown together in their dying father’s apartment are played by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne. Jacobs has orchestrated their performances so that there is a kind of atonal harmony among them that hangs together in cagey ways. Jay O. Sanders plays the father and his last scene is cagey as well - and, catching me off-guard, caused me to weep. I loved the quiet wisdom of this film. Be patient with it - and, after you watch it, with yourself.
DOWNSTREAM
(Above; Pitt and Abrams and Clooney in Wolfs on Apple TV.)
Wolfs is a shaggy dog story that got some good reviews. This isn’t one of them. It was all just an excuse for Brad Pitt and George Clooney to be “Brad Pitt” and “George Clooney.” Not to continue to carp about wigs and bald pates and now hair enhancements, but I kept watching it to inspect how bad sometimes their enhancements were with certain lighting and how good they were when they were better lit. Clooney though ended up reminding me of Elizabeth Taylor after she had her brain tumor surgery and she had that close-cropped white hair. Pitt? I kept thinking about Eve Arden at an awards ceremony.
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DOWNSTREAM
Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis won’t be mentioned at any awards ceremonies alas - or it might for its design elements. I wanted to like it as much at The New Yorker and The New York Times did but I kept rolling my eyes at it all. The man can direct but he can’t write. It was all a temporal mashup of ancient Roman and Greek references and modern politics and kind of creepy 1950s heterosexual harrumphing that held it all together not with lust exactly but with the banality of luster instead of the evil he seemed to be aiming for. I had just watched Monsters and I kept thinking I’d gone from the Oedipal to an edible because I was certain that Coppola had eaten a lot of gummies to make this gummed-up conglomeration of glamour and vulgarity and beauty and architecture. Trump supporter Jon Voight plays a Trump-like potentate with a penchant for power without prowess. Adam Driver is a Robert Moses-like polymath who can metaphysically stop time but won his Noble Prize instead for inventing a form of material that is magical in its properties but so mundane it can be worn on a red carpet. I kept trying to piece together the Greek and Roman - and cinematic - references in this hodgepodge that seems to have been written as a stoner's thesis in order to graduate from film school.
At one point, I did think someone was called “Teri” and I spelled it like that when I heard it because I thought of Teri Garr who starred in Coppola’s One from the Heart, another failed experiment full of fanciful sets and set-pieces. A folly. “Films live or die according to an inner rhythm of their own,” wrote Roger Ebert at the time. “The most dismal thing about One From The Heart is that it lacks those rhythms. It is a ballet of graceful and complex camera movements occupying magnificent sets, and somehow the characters get lost in the process. There was never a moment in this film when I cared about what was happening to the people in it.” Yep.
But Francis Ford Coppola is not afraid of his own artist’s heart. This is another film he’s sent forth from it. Laurence Fishburne and his role were cut from One from the Heart. He’s in Megalopolis as Driver’s driver. He furnishes the voice over too as a kind of stand-in for the director, who drove this souped-up jalopy of a film right off an art director’s idea of a road. I was touched that Coppola made up for cutting Fishburne from the earlier film. It might have been a kinder act of making amends, however, to cut him from this one, too.
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UPSTREAM
(Above: Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in The Apprentice.)
Watching Megalopolis I did think about Peter Thiel’s mentoring of J.D. Vance and Roy Cohn’s mentoring of Donald Trump, two Vichy Gays finding a mirror of themselves in straight crooked types because Megalopolis has narrative threads about how vanity and amorality and evil are all parts of powerful wealthy men mentoring the younger ones they cut from the herd to groom into their cultural and political and diabolical descendants mired in the muck of their own greedy grab for wealth and power. There is an essay to be written - I’m not enough of a cinephile or philosopher to write it - pairing Coppola’s film with the much better The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abasssi and written by Gabriel Sherman, which is about the Cohn /Trump pairing. Neither Sebastian Stan as Trump nor Jeremy Strong as Cohn do imitations of Trump and Cohn but they do capture the noxious ignobility within the melding of their id which is at the dark heart of Cohn’s mentoring of Trump until, that is, Cohn contracts AIDS and dies from it. Only Donald Trump could make me feel sorry for Roy Cohn. Stan give a stolid, stalwart performance as Trump. The scenes of his getting a scalp reductions and the suctioning of fat from his stomach will stay with me for a long time; that scene with the music underscoring it was more of a summing up of Trump’s America than any I’ve seen in a long time. No pundit could be clearer than those images. Strong is eery as Cohn, crude and nasty yet needy in his innate affinities which he thinks of as elective. He makes Cohn’s reptilian quality both repulsive and riveting - just like Abassi’s film itself.
Trump is still - for now - not doing time.